b wm 






I 




CopigtitW. 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



CJk jEetf)ot!tst ^uiptt 



The Hungry Christ 




Qu^^ 



The Hungry Christ 



And Other Sermons Preached in Walnut Hills 
Methodist Episcopal Church, Cincinnati 

By 

Jesse Bowman Young, D. D. 



% 



CINCINNATI: JENNINGS AND PYE 
NEW YORK: EATON AND MAINS 



YuH* 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Two Copies Received 

MAY 31 1904 
Cooyrl£ht Entry 

CLASS J al XXo. No. 

COPY B 



COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY 
.*.JEK&£NpS !X^D JYE 



CONTENTS 



Chapter. Page 

I. The Hungry Christ Tempted, - 7 

II. " The Bethlehem Legends," - 25 

III. Miracles : Their Meaning and 

Function, 39 

IV. The Tri-1/lngual Inscription, - 58 
V. Strength for the Day, - - 73 

VI. The Soul Damaged by Sin, - 84 

VII. God's Signal for a Forward 

Movement, 99 

VIII. The Healing Touch, - - - 114 

IX. A Man as an Hiding Place, - - 129 



THE HUNGRY CHRIST TEMPTED. 

"Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wil- 
derness to be tempted of the devil. And when 
He had fasted forty days and forty nights, He 
afterward hungered. And the tempter came." — 
Matt, iv, i, 2. (Revised Version.) 

In the foreground of the Gospel history, at the 
beginning of the account of that ministry of grace 
by whose teaching and example the world has been 
morally rejuvenated, we are confronted with a spec- 
tacle which is fraught with instruction and comfort 
for all the generations of time — the Hungry Christ 
Tempted! How much it means to us, and to all 
men, that He felt the pangs of famishment, that He 
was tortured by hunger, and that, alone and bur- 
dened and exhausted, He was assailed in the wilder- 
ness with temptation! Let us study some of the 
most obvious phases of this most significant incident. 

There is matter in this incident for a volume, 
7 



8 The Hungry Christ. 

rather than for a single sermon. Let us group about 
the figure of the Hungry Christ, tempted by the 
Adversary of souls, a few of the lessons which lie 
on the very surface of the narrative. 

I. And, first, let us look at a preliminary feature 
of the story — the timeliness of the assailment; for 
that is what made it of tremendous force. Occur- 
ring at the outset of the Master's career, it marked 
the opening of His public life, and came at the time 
when His policy had to be determined upon, His 
principles had to be indicated, His plans had to be 
shaped. His public life was to be accompanied 
throughout by assailment, allurements, enticements 
such as are thrown in the way of every worker ; but 
now at the very inception of His enterprise there 
was thrust upon Him a series of typical temptations 
which had a direct bearing upon the work to be un- 
dertaken. 

This phase of the case may be paralleled by sim- 
ilar allurements which every earnest soul must face 
in making plans for a vocation, or in passing the 
critical stages and turning points which come early 
in every strenuous human career. The young col- 
lege student must at the beginning of his work de- 
cide what sort of a life he is going to lead, — whether 
he will be really a student, a toiler, an aspirant after 



The Hungry Christ Tempted. 9 

knowledge; whether he will strive for discipline, 
culture, wisdom; or whether he will simply drift 
through the four years and come out at the end with 
barely enough credits in his favor to afford him a 
diploma. The young business man must at the out- 
set determine whether his policy shall be one of in- 
dustry, integrity, enterprise, frugality, fidelity to 
noble principles, or whether, on the other hand, he 
will follow a multitude to do evil, imitate the tricks 
of trade followed by his competitors, and be simply 
the sport of circumstances, floating upon the cur- 
rents of commerce. The man who starts out in a pro- 
fession in like manner has to face similar questions. 
Will he cultivate a high professional ideal, care more 
for his personal honor than for money, cherish a 
scrupulous regard for faithful and honest service, 
strive first and foremost for efficiency, for character, 
for knowledge of the truth; or will he allow him- 
self to become a quack, a shyster, a trickster, aiming 
simply at getting money, or struggling primarily for 
personal notoriety or so-called popularity? 

Need I say that the principles adopted at the out- 
set, the aims and ideals which are cherished at the 
start, have a shaping force, a molding influence upon 
all the after life? Temptations therefore which 
occur at the outset of one's life take hold upon the 



io The Hungry Christ. 

very roots of character, upon the foundations of the 
moral and intellectual life, upon the fundamental 
factors which determine success or failure. This 
principle makes a study of the temptation of our 
Lord at the opening of His ministry one of far 
reaching import and value to us. This incident in 
His ministry was not merely incidental, but essen- 
tial, fundamental, and formative in its issues and 
influence. It was like the trial voyage of a battle- 
ship, in which every wheel, valve, gauge, piston, 
cylinder, boiler, crank, pinion, and pulley in the com- 
plicated machinery is watched, tested, and judged by 
experts in order to determine whether the vessel is 
likely to stand the storms and commotions and perils 
of tempest and voyage and darkness and battle in 
its adventurous career, now possibly begun. A test 
at the outset, a searching trial at the beginning, a 
series of typical temptations at the opening of His 
career, having a direct and evident relation to His 
whole career, — this is the picture set now before us. 
2. Further note that the temptation came imme- 
diately after a wonderful and uplifting spiritual ex- 
perience. The Master had emerged from His home 
in Nazareth, and had come to the Jordan, and had 
there been baptized by John. This public consecra- 
tion of Himself to His work, this ordination service 



The Hungry Christ Tempted. ii 

at the hands of the Forerunner, was accompanied by 
inward and outward tokens of blessing. John recog- 
nized that He was the Messiah; there came upon 
the Master a visible descent of the Spirit in the form 
of a dove ; and a voice came out of heaven, reaching 
possibly other ears besides that of the Lord Himself, 
"Thou art My beloved Son; in Thee I am well 
pleased." A new enduement of Divine power came 
upon Him, giving Him an uplift, a scope of vision, 
a sense of power, an experience of ennoblement, a 
consciousness of authority and spiritual elevation, 
unknown before. We gather this from the words of 
the evangelist, St. Luke, who tells us that when 
Jesus returned from the Jordan after the baptism 
He was "full of the Holy Spirit." This had not 
been said of His experience before. In view of the 
work before Him, the pressure to be put upon Him, 
the duties of His new office, the trials He was to 
bear, the comfort He was to administer, the bless- 
ings He was to dispense, He was on this occasion, as 
He had never been before, "filled" with the Spirit's 
influence, purity, and power. Possibly the super- 
natural equipment which He needed in order to heal 
the sick, and quiet the storm and cleanse the leper 
and cast out demons, or perhaps the full conscious- 
ness of that high endowment, came upon Him at the 



12 Ths Hungry Christ. 

baptism. He realized now in the fullest measure His 
great mission, His Messianic functions and respon- 
sibilities, the vastness and the difficulties of His task, 
and the mighty and blessed equipment which was 
provided for Him in view of all the needs of the 
future. To His human nature there came a new 
revelation of Divine girding and strength, a new 
assurance of heavenly co-operation, a new life from 
above, as the way was now opened for Him to 
commence the task of which He had been dreaming, 
over which He had been praying, for which He had 
been preparing ever since earliest childhood. 

We may not enter into the secrets of the new 
experiences which gladdened and uplifted His soul, 
the new joy which lighted His path and illumined 
His vision, the new quickening which came to heart 
and brain. But of the fact that this was an occasion 
of precious, exalted, profound, and far-reaching spir- 
itual experiences and revelations, no one who reads 
the New Testament can doubt. Just as the disciples 
themselves were qualified for their larger activities 
by the special descent of the Spirit upon them on the 
day of Pentecost, just so it occurred that the Master 
was fitted out and furnished forth for His ministry 
in an especial manner by the descent of the Spirit 
upon Him at His baptism. 



The; Hungry Christ Tempted. 13 

It was in this exalted mood, this rapturous time 
of communion with His Father, this season when His 
heart was filled with visions of victory, plans of help- 
ing and rescuing men, thoughts of peace and hope 
and blessing for the world, — it was in the midst of 
such an experience that the temptation in the wil- 
derness came to Him. The contrast made the assail- 
ments all the more terrible and trying. As Fairbairn 
says, it is significant that this part of our Savior's 
career came "just after the baptism and just before 
the public ministry; just after the long silence and 
just before the brief yet eternal speech; just after 
the years of privacy and just before the few but 
glorious months of publicity." This season of glad- 
ness and of spiritual elevation was immediately fol- 
lowed by a time of subtle assailment, of Satanic 
enticement, of attack and allurement marked by all 
the craft, ingenuity, and tremendous might which 
are characteristic of the Adversary of souls. 

Satan has not ceased to practice this policy in the 
world. He takes advantage to-day, as he did in the 
olden time, of the special times and seasons of human 
experience in order to take human souls at a disad- 
vantage. After a time of light and joy and peace, 
he sometimes brings dismal fears, forebodings, and 
depressions. Once in a while experiences of turbu- 



14 The: Hungry Christ. 

lence and horror come to the convert soon after con- 
version. Even John Wesley testifies to this fact in 
his Journals. He tells the world that on a certain 
date he felt his heart strangely warmed, and knew 
that he had been forgiven, that Christ had died even 
for him, and that he had passed from death unto 
life. This was a blessed escape and relief for him 
after long years of penance, of praying, and of toil. 
That was on May 24, 1738, about nine o'clock in the 
evening. He testified then and there concerning 
the new experience which had come to him, and an 
hour later friends went with him to his brother 
Charles, who had found peace some time before, and 
they prayed and sang and rejoiced together. But 
before the night was over he was "much buffeted 
with temptations, which returned again and again." 
The next day the enemy injected a fear that "the 
change was not great enough, and that therefore his 
faith was not real." Two days later he was "in 
heaviness through manifold temptations." After a 
week he records the fact that he had "grieved the 
Spirit of God, that God had hidden His face, and he 
was in trouble and heaviness" till the next morning. 
And five months later we find him writing bitter 
things against himself, lamenting that he had not re- 
ceived the witness of the Spirit, accusing himself of 



The; Hungry Christ Tempted. 15 

not being a Christian, and fancying that the love of 
God had departed from him! He declares that he 
had no joy, nor peace, nor love; that, although he 
had used all the means of grace for twenty years and 
had months before this received the joyful assurance 
of pardon, yet he was not a Christian ! Knowing his 
life as we now do, we can easily see that this was 
simply a temptation, but that it was well-timed; it 
was hurled against the evangelist just when his heart 
was rilled with new-found ardor and joy, when he 
was planning great victories for the Master, and 
when defeat would mean much for the cause of Satan 
in the world. Let no man or woman, therefore, be 
unduly alarmed if temptations come immediately 
after great spiritual victories, if depression closely 
follows elation, if tears come after joy, if fears and 
a horror of great darkness and a fierce fight of 
afflictions shall immediately follow upon the heels 
of a notable victory. Laughter and tears lie side 
by side in the human heart; and Satan knows well 
how to time his assaults so as to make the contrast 
between light and darkness all the more terrible. 

It was only a few days after Paul's wonderful 
vision at the gates of Damascus, after the scales had 
fallen from his eyes and he had been made to rejoice 
as a brother beloved in the communion of saints, — 



16 The; Hungry Christ. 

when the mob pursued him, when plots to kill him 
were made, and when he had to flee by night out of 
the city and escape into Arabia in order to elude the 
plot of those who would slay him. Bunyan in his 
"Pilgrim's Progress" tells us on one page of his 
work about Christian and Hopeful as they found 
Dn their way a pleasant river — the river of the water 
of life. On its banks they walked with delight, they 
drank of its life-giving streams "pleasant and en- 
livening to their weary spirits." They ate of the 
luscious fruits which grew by the river, and slept 
in the meadows among the lilies, and were refreshed. 
Life seemed to them just then a season of unbroken 
joy and peace. But almost on the next page we are 
told of By-path Meadow, and of deep pits in which 
the pilgrims floundered, and of capture by Giant 
Despair, and of imprisonment in the dungeons of 
Doubting Castle. Earlier in the pilgrimage a sim- 
ilar contrast occurs when we find the two wayfarers 
lodged on their journey in the House called Beau- 
tiful, and sleeping in the large upper chamber whose 
window opened toward the sun-rising, and "whose 
name was Peace," so that when they woke refreshed 
and rejoicing they sang their song of hope and glad- 
ness that they had "already dwelt next door to 
heaven." But on the very day they started out afresh 



The Hungry Christ Tempted. 17 

on their pilgrimage, before the evening came, they 
entered the Valley of Humiliation, where Christian 
was engaged in mortal combat with the foul fiend 
Apollyon. After fighting with him and overcoming, 
there was but a short interval of rest before they 
entered into the Valley of the Shadow of Death. 
Thus side by side the great Allegorist paints the 
shifting scenes of the Christian life, his wisdom and 
insight being revealed in the fact that he shows 
struggle and joy and victory closely allied with tears 
and grief and humiliation and pain. 

These manifold instances may serve to suggest 
to us the lesson involved in the timeliness of our 
Lord's temptation. We may expect a reaction after 
great elevation of soul, and we should be on our 
guard against the assailments which are likely to 
come upon us in connection with such seasons of 
rejoicing and elation. 

3. Further, how significant and suggestive is the 
truth that our Lord was tempted when hungry; 
that it was the hungry Christ who was assailed! 
Here is a fact which brings the Master into singu- 
larly close and intimate touch with the great mass of 
struggling humanity who toil in daily agony for 
bread. When we reflect on the amount of wealth 
that there is in the world, and on the vast sums that 
2 



1 8 The: Hungry Christ. 

are worse than wasted in sensuality, in dissolute liv- 
ing, in gaudy and gorgeous displays, the heart sinks 
within us at the thought of the scores of millions of 
people on the globe who have never known what it is 
to have enough food to satisfy hunger for one day. 
They go to sleep with an empty stomach gnawing 
at their vitals; they wake emaciated and weak from 
lack of nourishment ; their one long, unbroken cry, 
from birth till death, is Food, Food, Food ! Think 
of the millions who have died of famine in India; 
consider the struggle for bread which goes on among 
the hunger-pinched millions of China; recall for a 
moment the degradation and misery of the squalid 
tribes of Africa where vast multitudes eke out the 
lowest sort of an animal existence by living on roots, 
reptiles, and offal ; picture to yourselves the condition 
and environment of great masses of laboring people 
in this and other lands, where the wage-earning head 
of the family has to provide rent, food, clothing, 
medicine, and all other expenses of the household on 
an income of a dollar or two a day, at which rate 
life is simply one prolonged face-to-face struggle 
with starvation; think of the food riots which now 
and then have taken place, even in our own day, in 
large cities, when savage and half-starved mobs of 
famishing men and women have paraded the streets 



The Hungry Christ Tempted. 19 

with their banners, clamoring for "Bread or Blood," 
• — it is only when you recall these things and allow 
them to have their weight with your judgment that 
you can appreciate the significance of the great truth 
that "the anguish of hungry men" was felt by the 
Son of God, that a fierce attack was made upon Him 
when He was famishing, and that He thereby came 
into fellowship with the needy and the starving and 
the famine-stricken, with multitudes who, dying by 
inches, feel for the time as if bread were the chief 
thing in the world. 

But this phase of the temptation has a larger 
scope, for hunger is but one of the appetites, clam- 
orous, rapacious, insatiable, with which we are 
equipped. And the appeal made by temptation to 
the Hungry Christ was really typical of the wider 
and more general appeal to appetite which Satan 
makes continually in dealing with men. Looking at 
the scene from this view-point we may apprehend 
how the Master was tempted in all points like as we 
are, and yet without sin. And since this assailment 
may be taken to include all the enticements which 
are based on bodily needs and fleshly appetites, we 
may rejoice in the vision which it affords of the 
Master victorious over such attacks, and furnished 
by His experience of temptation with a tender and 



20 The Hungry Christ. 

all-embracing sympathy for all who are similarly 
assailed. Wherefore He is able to succor them that 
are tempted! 

4. Another phase of this incident needs to be 
emphasised: it came in a period of physical exhaus- 
tion, when the life forces were at a low ebb, when 
bodily strength had well-nigh collapsed, and when 
the manhood had been weakened to the point of fam- 
ishment by fasting, prayer, nightly vigils, and a so- 
journ in the wilderness for forty days. Doubtless 
these had been also days of temptation, but the char- 
acter of the assailments to which He was subjected 
during that period is not hinted at. The full force 
of the temptation, the three typical assailments, 
came when the forty days of fasting were at an end, 
when He was weakened to the point of exhaustion 
by hunger and spiritual struggles and the natural 
reaction from profound inner experiences. Nervous 
force, brain power, bodily strength, physical forti- 
tude, — these were all under a tremendous pressure 
when the Evil One came upon Him in full power. 
In this sense also the temptation was well-timed. 
The attack was skillfully contrived so as to be oper- 
ative just at the time when the human nature of the 
tempted One was depleted to the point of utter 
weakness. 

Satan pursues the same policy to-day. He fol- 



The Hungry Christ Tempted. 21 

lows up men patiently, waits till his victims are 
breathless, faint, exhausted, and then crowds upon 
them with all his fiery agencies of pain and allure- 
ment. Those who long to win great victories in the 
spiritual life need to consider carefully their hours 
of weakness and exhaustion, for these are always 
hours of risk and exposure. The lawyer who has 
used up his energies in a taxing trial of wit and 
knowledge and skill in the court, and comes out with 
his strength used up and his life forces depleted ; the 
physician who, at the end of a long day of labor, in 
which sympathy, wisdom, strength, help, and life 
have been poured forth by him without stint, finds 
himself in the evening almost helpless in his weak- 
ness; the woman in the home who, driven with her 
exacting duties, irritated by manifold exasperations 
and weighted down with the heavy burdens which 
ofttimes come to her, finding more than two hands 
can do in the work of the day, comes to the evening 
hour tired, heartsick, faint, and on the verge of a 
nervous collapse; the working man toiling to the 
utmost limit of his bodily powers from morning till 
night; the financier, anxious on account of his in- 
vestments, his credit at stake, his estate tottering in 
the balance, his earthly interests involved in the turn 
of the market, and his brain distracted when the 
week's end is reached as he turns from his office to 



22 The Hungry Christ. 

his home, not knowing what the next week may 
bring forth, — all these are instances of men and 
women who are on the edge of peril. For such an 
exigent period in human experience is always a time 
of danger. Temptation then comes with unwonted 
advantage, with tenfold force, with sweeping power. 

Let every man and woman take warning, then, 
that the time of physical exhaustion is a time of 
peculiar hazard. Temptation launches its assail- 
ments at the soul when it is unstrung, ungirded; 
when its energies are relaxed and unhinged; when 
its faculties, having been on a strain for days or 
weeks, are off guard. Under such circumstances 
the soul is in imminent danger. 

Browning's insistent message to the world was 
that the "ungirt loin and the unlit lamp" were the 
great cause of human failure, the great occasion of 
condemnation. One of his most characteristic utter- 
ances for all time and for all men is that which is 
found in his very latest lines written just before his 
death, in which he described himself as 

"One who never turned his back, but marched breast 
forward, — 

Never doubted clouds would break ; 
Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would 

triumph ; 
Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, 
Sleep to wake !" 



The: Hungry Christ Tempted. 23 

The lines remind us of the vivid phrase used by 
the unknown author of the Book of Judges in de- 
scribing the unrelenting fortitude of Gideon and his 
men, after they had driven the Midianites across the 
plains and down into the Jordan Valley and across 
that turbid stream: "Faint, yet pursuing." That 
word contains the secret of many a victory. But to 
relax purpose, and to allow the soul to be ungirt in 
the hour of faintness, is to incur peril of the most 
threatening sort. 

The man who is strong in his hours of weakness ; 
who holds his tongue in restraint when his nerves 
are rasped and his soul inwardly upheaves; who 
maintains his equipoise when crushed and burdened, 
and writhing in pain and uncertainty, — that man is 
the true hero. Be on your guard, then, in times of 
bodily collapse and of physical weakness. Those 
are times of peril and of dread. 

I have but glanced at some of the circumstances 
which environ the Temptation, and my time is ex- 
hausted. Jesus was tempted to doubt the Heavenly 
Father's care ; tempted to use in His own behalf the 
miraculous powers which had been given to Him 
in trust for the needs and sorrows and advantage of 
men; tempted to doubt even His own Divine Son- 
ship ; tempted to presume and be rash and overven- 



24 The Hungry Christ. 

turesome, to expose Himself to perils to which duty 
and faith did not urge Him ; tempted to take a short 
and easy path to the throne by compromising with 
Satan, by using a policy of display and dazzling 
the wonder-loving mob by an exhibition of spectac- 
ularism; tempted to buy from Satan the kingdom 
for which He had at last to give His life, — these, in 
brief, were the chief elements in the temptations 
which inaugurated our Lord's ministry. It was no 
mock show contest, but a battle royal which occurred 
in the wilderness. Edward Irving once said : "When 
I remember all the circumstances of this trial, this 
conflict between Satan and Christ, it stands before 
my imagination as the most terrible thing to which 
the earth or the heavens above have ever been wit- 
ness." It was, we may believe, a struggle in which 
we were vitally interested, a conflict which took 
place in our behalf; for it was not as a man simply 
that Christ resisted, but as the Messiah, the anointed 
Christ, who was about to enter upon His public 
ministry, and who was to be tested as by fire in ad- 
vance of any sermon or miracle or official intercourse 
with the people to whom He was to preach the Word. 
When He triumphed, therefore, He shows us how 
we may win ! 



II. 

"THE BETHLEHEM LEGENDS." 

"And the angel answered and said unto her, The 
Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power 
of the Most High shall overshadow thee: where- 
fore also the holy thing which is begotten shall 
be the Son of God." — Luke i, 35. 

In these gracious and reverent words of the 
angel Gabriel, spoken to Mary of Nazareth, in that 
part of the Gospel which is known as the "Annun- 
ciation to the Virgin Mary," we find ourselves face 
to face with the central mystery of the New Testa- 
ment, — the doctrine of the Incarnation of the Son 
of God. The text may fitly serve to bring before us 
some of the essential truths and vital lessons con- 
nected with the Gospel of the Infancy of our Lord. 

Among the recent attacks which have been made 
on the New Testament, some of the most vehement 
have been directed against the accounts given us in 
two of the Gospels concerning the supernatural birth 

25 



26 The: Hungry Christ. 

of the Savior. These assaults have come in some 
cases from clergymen and scholars who do not re- 
ject the Divinity of Christ, who accept the resurrec- 
tion as a part of the indubitable record, who believe 
in some, at least, of the miraculous elements of the 
Book, but who find it difficult to accept what they 
call these Bethlehem myths and legends, which they 
assert have been added without just warrant in the 
course of time to the actual narrative of the Gospels. 
They further claim that they do not need to believe 
in the miraculous birth of Jesus in order to be con- 
vinced of His power to save ; that without weakening 
the foundations of Christianity they are at liberty 
to remove these earlier portions of the Gospels from 
the place which they have occupied for ages, and 
accept Jesus Christ as a man, born like other men, 
but chosen and set apart by God for the supreme 
work to which He devoted His life. They urge the 
plea that the story of the miraculous birth, being 
found in only two of the Gospels, and not referred 
to by the Master Himself, and hardly hinted at by 
St. Paul, is not necessarily an essential part of the 
Gospels, and that we need not accept it in order to 
be orthodox believers. In view of these assaults, 
which are in the very air of this age of hypercriti- 
cism, and of so-called free thought and liberalism, 



"The Bethlehem Legends/' 27 

it may be worth while, on this Christmas Sunday, to 
suggest some of the reasons why we accept the nar- 
ratives of the birth and childhood of Jesus of Naza- 
reth as unquestionably true, and as forming a reason- 
able and credible and vital part of the Gospel history. 
1. And, first, let us think for a moment on this 
phase of the case, namely, that these stories of the 
birth and childhood of Jesus Christ in Matthew and 
Luke form an inseparable and integral part of those 
Gospels in all ancient manuscripts and modern ver- 
sions. Not one of the texts that have come down to 
us lacks these portions. No textual critic, skilled 
in the knowledge of the Greek manuscripts of the 
New Testament, has ever cast any suspicion on these 
early chapters. Wherever the Gospel by Luke has 
been found it has contained these wonderful first and 
second chapters with the account of the annunciation 
to Zacharias, the birth of John the Baptist, the an- 
nunciation to Mary at Nazareth, and the birth of 
Jesus at Bethlehem. And so wherever Matthew's 
Gospel in any age has been found, the first and sec- 
ond chapters, with the genealogy, the vision to Joseph, 
the birth at Bethlehem, the visit of the Magi, and the 
massacre of the infants by Herod, have made up its 
opening portions. Critics have no right whatever, 
on textual grounds, to reject the early portions thus 



28 The; Hungry Christ. 

found in these Gospels as unhistorical. They might 
just as well thrust out of the story the Sermon on 
the Mount, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and the 
Crucifixion. These are all found in the same docu- 
ments, and they form an invariable part of the orig- 
inal documents. The fact that Mark does not men- 
tion the miraculous birth may be accounted for by 
the intentional brevity of his work ; he devotes only 
two verses to the temptation, when two of the evan- 
gelists give that incident a dozen verses. Mark evi- 
dently intended to give a short, terse, running ac- 
count of the ministry of Jesus, and he leaps at once 
into the opening of the ministry of John the Baptist, 
omitting all the record previous to that event. And 
as John's Gospel evidently aims to supply what the 
other Gospels had omitted, nearly all of his work is 
new. But when he says, "The Word became flesh 
and dwelt among us," is it not clear that he affords 
us in those words a vision into his own conviction 
and belief concerning the supernatural birth of the 
Savior ? 

2. When we compare the sober, reticent, delicate, 
and beautiful story which Matthew and Luke give 
us with the fanciful, grotesque, and coarse myths and 
legends to be found in the apocryphal Gospels, we 
see at once the difference between the two. The nar- 



"The Bethlehem Legends/'' 29 

ratives of Matthew and Luke are reverent, pure, 
sweet in their odor as the lily of the valley, as radiant 
as the dawn of the morning. The mysteries of birth, 
childhood, motherhood, are dealt with in a spirit of 
purity, faith, and reticence, from which all morbid 
curiosity, all unseemly thought, all irreverent con- 
jectures, all ignoble suggestions, are absolutely shut 
out. But in the apocryphal productions, made up of 
wild, absurd, silly, and ofttimes monstrous stories, 
which gathered in the course of time about the tra- 
ditional life of Christ — the offspring of Oriental mys- 
ticism, credulity, fondness for marvels, the wonder- 
tnongering tendency of the dreamy Eastern world, — 
we pass at once into a different realm. There mar- 
vels are multiplied, and all sorts of weird, super- 
natural, and magical performances are palmed off as 
though they formed a part of the actual Gospels. 
For example, take one specimen. In these apocry- 
phal productions we have several chapters devoted 
to the infancy and childhood of Mary, the mother 
of our Lord. She is said to have taken seven steps 
alone when she was six months old, and while she 
was yet a little child she was, so the fable runs, held 
in admiration by all the people of Israel. The story 
goes that "when she was three years old she walked 
with a step so mature, she spake so perfectly, and 



3<> The Hungry Christ. 

spent her time so assiduously in the praises of God, 
that all were astonished at her and wondered. She 
was not reckoned as a young infant, but, as it were, 
a grown-up person of thirty years old ; for daily did 
she enjoy a Divine vision, daily was she visited by 
the angels of God, who were often seen speaking to 
her, who ministered to her, diligently obeying her, 
and who surrounded her day and night. She dwelt 
in the temple of the Lord and received her food from 
heaven from the hands of the angels." This stuff 
reminds us of the Arabian Nights' stories, but not of 
the sane, well-balanced, and reverent narratives 
found in Matthew and Luke. 

In the stories of the Infancy of Jesus retailed by 
these apocryphal Gospels the contrast becomes even 
more striking. Three suns are said to have appeared 
in the heavens in Spain on the day of His birth as a 
sign of the Trinity ; the very animals adored the in- 
fant Jesus in the manger; and soon after His birth 
He is said to have spoken and said to Mary, "I am 
Jesus, the Son of God, the Logos." At the same 
moment the idols in Egyptian temples are said to 
have fallen from their pedestals and been broken to 
pieces, and the images of heathen deities in Persian 
temples are declared to have conversed one with 
another and to have uttered words of prophecy and 



"The; Bethlehem Legends." 31 

praise. The child Jesus is pictured as performing all 
sorts of miraculous pranks, working wonders day 
by day. The gold which the Wise Men brought as 
a part of their gift to the manger at Bethlehem is 
said in these legends to have been carried by Noah 
through the flood in the ark, buried with Adam in 
Jerusalem, coined by the father of Abraham, paid 
out in the form of coins for Joseph when sold as a 
slave in Egypt, and finally brought by the Queen of 
Sheba as' a part of her tribute to Solomon, and then, 
finally, having been taken away five hundred years 
later to the Far East at the time of the captivity, it 
came at last into the hands of the Magi ! 

These instances, typical of the legendary, wild, 
uncouth, and irreverent accretions which gathered 
about the Gospel story, as barnacles attach them- 
selves to a ship, suggest the difference between them 
and the sweet, pure, blessed narrative of the Child- 
hood given by our own evangelists, Matthew and 
Luke. No man with any discernment, no child even 
who has learned the difference between y£sop's 
Fables and the multiplication table, between Mother 
Goose's rhymes and Longfellow's Evangeline, can 
fail to see at a glance the radical contrast which ex- 
ists between the apocryphal and the genuine Gos- 
pels. The account which our own Gospels give us 



32 The Hungry Christ. 

is sober, noble, elevated, and reverent ; the others are 
silly, puerile, sometimes ghastly in their coarse 
realism, and all the while on a level infinitely below 
the record of the four evangelists. If you want to 
know the difference between the Gospels on the one 
hand, and the crude, commonplace efforts of mys- 
tical, credulous, and superstitious writers on the 
ether, take up any one of the Gospels which we have 
in the New Testament and read a paragraph any- 
where in them; then turn to these apocryphal writ- 
ings and read a paragraph. Instantly you feel the 
difference ! 

It has thus happened that the heretical, Gnostic, 
hostile, skeptical, and other apocryphal Gospels con- 
stitute, by virtue of the contrast which they suggest, 
a remarkable testimony to the unique and inimitable 
Gospels which we call our own. Just as you can tell 
the difference between the crooked and awkward 
drawings of a child and the sure, clear, artistic cre- 
ations of an artist; between the rude j anglings of an 
untutored hand on the piano and the confident and 
trained touch of a master; between the harsh and 
discordant voice of the street peddler and the lofty 
and inspiring tones of a Nordica or a Patti, — so you 
can tell almost at a glance the difference between the 
actual Gospels and the ancient myths and legends 



"The Bethlehem Legends/' 33 

and fairy stories and Oriental tales which were writ- 
ten in imitation of them. Comparing the two, we 
turn from the false gospels in amazement and dis- 
gust; we approach the others in candor, reverence, 
faith, and adoring love. Reading these genuine ac- 
counts of the Holy Childhood, we can see new mean- 
ing in the Apostles' Creed, repeated in many tongues 
and in almost all lands for sixteen or seventeen cen- 
turies : "And I believe in Jesus Christ, His only Son, 
our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost and 
born of the Virgin Mary." 

3. It may help us further to understand this truth 
now under consideration if we reflect on the fact that 
these pictures of the superhuman origin and birth of 
our Lord help to make His whole career harmonious 
and complete. When we think what He has done 
in the world and what He is doing to-day, we may 
find in the account of His Divine childhood a reve- 
lation of His character and mission which coheres 
logically with the rest of the history, which is conso- 
nant with the other incidents in His life ; which fits 
into its exact place to make a unified, beautiful, and 
reasonable narration. Were He any other Being 
than the Ruler of the modern age, the Creator of its 
noblest ideals, the Head of the Church militant and 
the Church triumphant, the Master Teacher of the 



34 The Hungry Christ. 

centuries, the case would be different. But when we 
behold Him in His enthronement to-day in art and 
literature and morals and in governmental ideals and 
legislation; when we recall what marvels He 
wrought when on earth, and what moral and spirit- 
ual transformations He is making in our own time, — 
does it not seem consonant with these facts that we 
behold Him born of a Virgin, and coming into the 
world with a Divine inheritance and lineage such as 
no other Being ever had ? To such a Being miracles 
seem fitting and inevitable; it was impossible — so 
says the Apostle Peter — that death should keep its 
hold on Him, and when we see Him walk the sea, 
raise the dead, cleanse the leper, and at last conquer 
death by His own resurrection, we may sanely and 
rationally say, It behooved such a Being to enter 
and to leave the world as no other man ever did. 
The wonder would be greater were we to find that 
He was simply a man like other men, with the same 
descent and the same end, — and yet the Master of 
mankind. The angelic visits to Mary of Nazareth, 
the song of the angels in the sky, the worshiping 
shepherds, the adoring Wise Men, the visions in the 
night, and the guidance of the star, — all these seem 
congruous elements in the narrative when we realize 
who He is of whom these incidents are related. 



"Ths Btfrm^HSM Legends." 35 

When we believe in His gifts of healing and His 
power to quell the storm, and His resurrection from 
the dead, what greater marvel remains in the whole 
story? Surely we may then find that the details of 
the Gospel, first to last, are harmonious; that they 
belong to and fit into one another ; that the symmetry 
of the life of Christ would have been marred, and 
the beauty of it depleted of some of its elemental 
charms, had the account of the infancy at Bethlehem, 
in Egypt, and at Nazareth been left out. When there 
are miracles throughout His ministry, and at the end 
the crowning one, why halt at the fact that the story 
opens with a miraculous birth, and with angelic an- 
nunciations, and other incidents fitly joined to these, 
and preluding them? 

4. Then consider how poor the world zvould be 
to-day without the Christmas beliefs, hopes, and 
habits, without the associations and practices of the 
season, without the songs which now belt the earth 
with gladness. There may be some hypercritical 
folks in the world who fancy that they would prefer 
a Gospel which has no Christmas in it, no account of 
the Birth at Bethlehem, and no visit of the Wise 
Men. But for me, and for most folks, the Gospels 
would be shorn of one of their chief charms were 
these elements left out. Poets have found in these 



36 The Hungry Christ. 

incidents of the childhood their noblest inspiration; 
hymnists have translated the chant of the angels into 
human speech, and lifted the nations skyward as they 
have listened to the song. Recall that one mas- 
terly work of Handel, "The Oratorio of the Mes- 
siah," and then ask what the world would be without 
it. Recall the hundreds of works wrought out for 
Christmas music, and then remember that the com- 
posers in fancy visited Bethlehem in order to get 
their themes, and that they gained at the manger 
some of their noblest chords. How poor the world 
of art would be were there no Christmas, and no in- 
spiration for painting in the story of the childhood ! 
The noblest pictures of womanhood, the sweetest pic- 
tures of childhood, and some of the greatest paint- 
ings ever put on canvas have been suggested and 
wrought out under the mystic spell of these incidents 
of the infancy. Then consider how these events and 
scenes have enriched literature through the passing- 
centuries, and how home life has been beautified and 
the experience of the believer has been exalted by 
meditations on the childhood of Jesus. What a loss 
would befall the whole earth were there no truth in 
the Christmas stories, were the whole thing myth 
and fable ! 

5. But what is the inner meaning of this great 



"The Bethlehem Legends/' 37 

fact at Bethlehem? What does it signify that angels 
sing in the sky, and shepherds adore and testify, and 
Wise Men make their offerings, and Mary keeps 
these things in her heart? What is the great fact, 
after all? The one mysterious, supreme truth here 
declared is, that the Infinite God has taken upon Him- 
self a tabernacle of clay wherein to sojourn among 
men. Leaving His throne, His glory, His sover- 
eignty, His retinue of angels, holding in abeyance 
for the time His infinite attributes, He deigns to live 
a life of poverty and toil among men, and has no 
place to lay His head. He undertakes to live the 
ordinary life of a man among men. He does all this, 
that He may give us a clear, apprehensible, and con- 
crete picture of Himself. We can with difficulty 
think of God as a pure Spirit, without body or parts. 
We find it hard to conceive of Him without pictur- 
ing Him as a Being like ourselves. We can not 
"take Infinity by the hand," or come face to face 
with One who sitteth on the circle of the heavens, or 
form any adequate conception of Him in whose 
hands are the deep places of the earth, who counteth 
the number of the stars, and calleth them all by their 
names. When we reflect on the truth that He is 
great, and greatly to be praised, and that His great- 
ness is unsearchable, we sink in dust and ashes to the 



38 'The; Hungry Christ. 

earth, overpowered with a sudden sense of our own 
littleness and of His awful and unspeakable vastness 
and majesty and power. 

Over against that revelation let us look at the 
representation of God which we have in the person, 
the character, the message, and ministry of our Lord. 
If you desire to know what the great God is, how 
He feels toward the suffering and the sinful, how 
He yearns over the prodigal, how He welcomes the 
penitent, consider Him who said when on earth, He 
that hath seen Me hath seen the Father. And look- 
ing up into His face as He sits on the throne, wait- 
ing till the day of His final conquest of the earth by 
His Gospel, we may fitly join with all ages and 
lands in uttering from the heart that ancient word 
of reverent and adoring worship : 

"Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ, 

Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father. 

When Thou tookest upon Thee to deliver man, Thou didst 
humble Thyself to be born of a Virgin. 

When Thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death, Thou 
didst open the kingdom of heaven to all believers. 

Thou sittest at the right hand of God, in the glory of God 
the Father. 

We believe that Thou shalt come to be our Judge. 

We therefore pray Thee, help Thy servants, whom Thou 
hast redeemed with Thy precious blood. 

Make them to be numbered with Thy saints, in glory ever- 
lasting. Amen" 



III. 



MIRACLES: THEIR MEANING AND FUNC- 
TION. 

"Now when He was in Jerusalem at the Passover, in 
the feast day, many believed in His name when 
they saw the miracles which He did" — John 
ii, 23. 

You are invited to give attention to the question 
of the miracles of the New Testament, especially 
those wrought by our Lord as written down in the 
four Gospels. These documents are interpenetrated, 
through and through, with the story of certain won- 
derful works done by Jesus of Nazareth, day by day, 
from the opening of His ministry down to its very 
close. Were the story of the miracles taken out of 
the Gospels these books would be left in shreds and 
tatters. It behooves us, therefore, particularly in 
view of the current assaults on the miraculous ele- 
ments of the Bible, the fight that is going on against 
supernaturalism, to understand what miracles mean ; 

39 



4-o The Hungry Christ. 

why we may no longer expect to see them per- 
formed; what their functions were in the Gospel 
story ; and what ground we have in this day of ques- 
tion and doubt, this critical, matter-of-fact, prosaic, 
scientific era in which we live, for believing in them. 
To define a miracle is no easy task. Many 
definitions have been attempted which are unsatis- 
factory. To say that a miracle is an act in violation 
of the laws of nature, or against the course of nature, 
or in suspension of the natural laws in force about 
us, does not meet the case. A simpler description of 
a miracle is this: It is an act or event, produced at 
the bidding or through the instrumentality of one 
who professes to bring a message from the Almighty, 
— an act which clearly transcends the known laws 
and operations of nature, and which is evidently be- 
yond unaided human power, and which is done with 
the aim of confirming and substantiating the mes- 
senger's claims and the validity of his message. 
Thus it may be beyond and above nature, but not in 
opposition to it. It may be said to stand in the same 
relation to the ordinary operations of nature that a 
comet's visit to our planetary system does to the 
usual course of events with which we are familiar 
here. Now and then such a heavenly visitor comes 
within our ken. Whence it comes we do not know ; 



Miracles: Meaning and Function. 41 

it does not follow a regular orbit such as the planets 
of our system do; it appears but for a little while, 
coming we know not whence, paying no heed to 
the orbits and motions of the worlds which whirl 
about our central sun, circling about him and then 
flying off into far distant space, but signifying to us 
that a new world has dawned upon our vision and 
then has passed beyond our sight. Thus the miracle 
now and then has appeared, with its own meaning, 
its own laws, unknown to us, and then it has passed 
away, leaving only the record it has made and the 
memory of its startling visitation. After centuries 
of ordinary transactions, reverses, disasters, suc- 
cesses, failures, the miracle flashes before us, im- 
presses its message, substantiates the message of the 
One who perfoms it, and then for ages the usual 
course of events goes on. 

With regard to miracles some people are stag- 
gered and halted by their conceptions of natural law. 
They say, The operations of nature with which we 
are acquainted are regular, governed by invariable 
law, and are not to be interfered with. How can God 
interpose in the midst of these operations of inflexible 
law by supernatural and miraculous interventions? 
Let us think of this a moment. Is it reasonable to 
fancy that the Creator would set up the machinery 



42 The Hungry Christ. 

of the universe, and set it adrift, so constructed that 
He would not be at liberty to do anything in it after- 
ward except to keep it a-going ? Would He build a 
wall about it and shut Himself out of it altogether? 
Is He tied up by His own laws? Is that reason- 
able? If He is not merely the mighty Creator, but 
also a loving Father, would He not be likely to leave 
Himself some leeway for His own loving mercy? 
Moreover, we are interfering with the operations of 
natural law every day. The law of gravitation 
makes water run down hill, but we introduce ma- 
chinery and the operation of other laws which force 
il up hill. If I hold out my arm the law of gravi- 
tation tends to pull it down, but my will comes into 
play and I say, Stay up, and up it stays ! Thus con- 
tinually one law comes into play in human affairs 
in supervention of lower laws ; one force supersedes 
and counteracts another force, and thus by human 
action the operations of nature are continually 
changed, — not miraculously, but still essentially and 
by the exertion of the human will. And shall not 
the Almighty be free to bring higher laws, and 
nobler forces, and superhuman powers into play 
when He seeks to win the attention, to awaken the 
conscience, to move upon the heart of the race? If 
God can not interfere with nature and nature's 



Miracxes: Meaning and Function. 43 

laws, then He has made Himself of less account than 
the race He created ! 

Further, we may profitably recall the fact that 
our Lord made appeal to His miracles in His utter- 
ances from time to time as tokens of His Divine 
commission and authority. He said (John v, 36) : 
"The works which the Father hath given Me to finish 
bear witness of Me, that the Father hath sent Me." 
When the disciples of John the Baptist came to Jesus 
asking, "Art Thou the One that was to come, or do 
we look for another?" the Master responded: "Go 
tell John the things which ye do hear and see: the 
blind receive their sight, and the lame walk; the 
lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear ; and the dead 
are raised up, and the poor have good tidings 
preached to them." On another occasion he de- 
clared, "If I had not done among them the works 
which none other man did, they had not had sin, but 
now they have both seen and hated Me and My 
leather." These are fair specimens of Christ's ha- 
bitual appeal to His miracles as one of the grounds 
afforded for believing in His Divine claims. 

Possibly we may get a clearer apprehension of 
miracles if we note the chief terms which are used 
in the New Testament to define them. At once we 
chance upon a significant fact ; namely, that the word 



44 The Hungry Christ. 

signifying merely a wonderful thing is never applied 
alone to our Lord's healings or other great works. 
The term used in St. John's Gospel is "sign" — "the 
signs that He did." These works therefore were not 
mere marvels, not simply astounding events, but 
rather tokens of the nearness and help and inter- 
position of God, indications that He had appeared 
among men with new manifestations of mercy. 
They were intended not merely to awaken a sense 
of the marvelous, to arouse wonder, to astound men's 
minds with a vision of something beyond their ken ; 
but they were to serve as events in which men might 
discern the finger of God. This phase of the Gospel 
miracles differentiates them at once from all merely 
extraordinary events, scientific discoveries, juggler's 
feats, or magician's puzzling performances, which 
are intended simply to play on the appetite for the 
marvelous. When the Master performed a miracle 
He did it not to appeal to man's wonder, to make 
people gape and stare, but to indicate to them that 
He had come as their Helper and Physician and 
Lord. Miracles, then, are, first of all, signs of God's 
presence in the world. Another term is used in 
the first three Gospels — dunameis—irom which we 
get our word dynamite, translated "powers," or 
"mighty works." This word indicates the putting 



Miracxes: Meaning and Function. 45 

forth of extraordinary power, the bursting or break- 
ing into the world of a new force, whereby at the 
bidding of a human voice or the touch of a human 
hand the deaf were made to hear, and the lame to 
walk, and the dead were raised to life! 

Then note that these deeds were done, these 
wonders wrought by One who was absolutely peer- 
less among the teachers and prophets who ever ap- 
peared on earth. Wonderful things done, apparent 
miracles wrought, without the accompanying cre- 
dential of character, of doctrine worthy to be con- 
sidered Divine, would not serve as a warrant for us 
to accept a message. A man might come forth in 
our day and do marvelous things, heal the sick, and 
change silver into gold, and overcome the power of 
gravitation, and he might claim that these were so 
many credentials of a heavenly messenger. But un- 
less his character, his life, his doctrine, his message, 
commended him to our moral sense as also divine, 
he would clearly be an impostor. Miracles alone, 
therefore, are no proper credential of the Book ; but 
miracles taken in connection with the perfect, sinless, 
exceptional Man who wrought them, warrant us in 
accepting them and the message which they accom- 
pany. 

It is easy to discern the difference between the 



46 The Hungry Christ. 

mighty works of Christ and the so-called mir- 
acles of the childhood of Christ, and the jugglers' 
tricks attributed to Him in the apocryphal Gospels, 
and the alleged miracles wrought by the saints ac- 
cording to Roman Catholic legends. These, with 
hardly an exception, are not worthy to be named 
alongside of the mighty works of our Lord described 
in the Gospels. About these other marvels there is 
no dignity, no moral purpose, no spiritual meaning. 
Some of them are grotesque and coarse and even 
cruel ; but the deeds done by our Lord, after eighteen 
centuries of scrutiny and ages of assault, still remain 
beautiful, noble, outbeamings of His own merciful 
and Divine nature, entirely worthy of Him and of 
the doctrine which they guarantee as Divine. 

This aspect of the case, just hinted at, may be de- 
veloped a little further; namely, that miracles were 
appropriate and inevitable when performed by Jesus 
Christ. He stands alone in the moral and religious 
world, fairer than the children of men. No other 
teacher can be fitly placed alongside of Him. He is, 
with increasing luster, the Light of the world. Men 
have been studying His character, His words, His 
life for nearly nineteen hundred years, and they are 
still finding in them new charms, fresh sources of 
comfort, growing reasons for loyalty and service. 



MiracIvUs: Meaning and Function. 47 

He remains to-day undisputably the Sovereign in the 
realm of ethics, the Head of the Church, adored and 
honored as the King of kings and Lord of lords 
wherever His Word has gone. With His ministry 
came the inauguration of new ideals, the establish- 
ment of new institutions, the beginning of a new 
civilization. He Himself indeed has been called the 
greatest of all the miracles ! Now was it not fitting 
that such a Man should do such works — that the 
Man who confessedly stood at the top of the human 
race, their Lord and Master, should be able to con- 
trol the forces of the universe, lift by His mercy men 
and women from beds of suffering, smite with re- 
buke the foulness and violence of demons until they 
fled in dismay from His presence, and even in face 
of death and the grave exemplify His omnipotent 
power? Miracles to Him were as easy as breathing; 
they flowed from His nature like light from the sun. 
He was Himself apparently never surprised at them ; 
He did them in as easy and simple and natural a way 
as common men did ordinary things pertaining to 
their daily life. It should be clear to every mind, 
therefore, that miracles from Him were appropriate, 
consonant with His character and mission, inevitable 
accompaniments of His ministry. 

Further, the benevolence of Christ's wonderful 



48 The Hungry Christ. 

works can not be ignored when we fairly look at 
them. Nearly all of His miracles were wrought at 
the calling of human need, at the bidding of suffering 
or danger, — all except perhaps a single one, the 
cursing of the barren fig-tree ; and that was a warn- 
ing and an object lesson with a merciful end in view. 
He did no miracle of wrath or vengeance! In all 
of his signs and wonders therefore we see His com- 
passion exemplified, His mercy revealed. He heard 
the moan of the leper, and replied by an act of heal- 
ing. He saw the misery of the blind, and His mercy 
flowed out of His finger ends as He touched their 
eyes and they saw. He felt for the broken-hearted 
widow of Nain who was following her only son to 
the tomb, and He raised the young man from the 
dead and restored him to his mother. He heard the 
cry of dread and dismay from the blanched lips of 
His disciples when they, with Him in their boat 
asleep, were threatened by the waves, and He spoke 
and the waters heard Him and obeyed, and the storm 
became a calm. His heart was touched with the 
sight of toiling mothers, anxious and broken and 
weary, with their dying babes in their arms, and He 
put forth His hands and healed them. Thus the 
story runs day after day for three years. We can 
not even begin to study the meaning of the miracles 



Miracles: Meaning and Function. 49 

without coming to see at the very start that they have 
a beneficent purpose behind them, that they are sur- 
charged with revelations of redeeming mercy, that 
they are so many unfoldings of the tenderness, the 
kindness, the gentleness, the healing sympathy which 
were lodged in abundant measure in the heart of the 
Redeemer. Not in His words alone did He reveal 
the mercy which He brought to earth, but in His 
deeds of healing, His acts of compassion, His mir- 
acles of benevolence. His mighty works were not 
mere exhibitions of power, displays of vast match- 
less control over nature, huge, majestic, colossal, but 
unsympathetic arid without the touch of gentleness. 
Each of his miracles was a manifestation, an outflow- 
ing of His love. In each one He said, I have come 
to help, to heal, to comfort, to bless. 

This linking together of Almighty power with 
the deepest and tenderest compassion is a striking 
feature of the Gospel revelation. Much of our pity 
is bound up in our helplessness ; we see, and feel, and 
compassionate, and turn aside in grief because we 
can do nothing more. With Christ pity and power 
went together; Omnipotence and compassion were 
joined in His hand and heart ; the gentleness and ten- 
derness of a woman were united with the majestic 
power of the Almighty God. He never had to turn 
4 



50 The: Hungry Christ. 

away from His supplicants as the best and wisest 
and greatest of human beings must often do from 
those who are in suffering and need, and say : "I can 
do nothing more for you. I am at My wit's end. I 
have reached the limit of My power. In the face of 
your misery and danger and need I am dumb in de- 
spair and helplessness." Ah no ! The Master never 
found a case so desperate as to baffle His skill, a 
man or woman beyond the scope of His healing min- 
istry, a child so far gone that a word from Him 
would not quicken it into new life ! His miracles, 
then, have this great lesson for us, that in Him all the 
kindly sympathies of our nature are intertwined 
with the administration of infinite power. 

Another fact comes to light as we recall His min- 
istry of healing. He was as much a great Physician 
as He was a great Teacher. Much of His time was 
occupied with the cases of people afflicted with all 
manner of dreadful diseases. People who travel in 
the East to-day come home with their hearts and 
memories full of indescribable scenes of human 
misery which they have witnessed in Egypt, in Pales- 
tine, and elsewhere on their journey, — beggary of the 
worst type, foul and incurable maladies affecting the 
eyes, leprous diseases of many sorts, maimed and de- 
formed children, malformed beings who seem to be 



Miracles: Meaning and Function. 51 

simply so many horrible excrescences on the human 
race, and other monstrous exhibitions of disease and 
suffering, many of them peculiar to that climate and 
latitude. It was thus, too, when the Master was on 
the earth. Wherever He went He saw the same 
sights ; He felt them all the more keenly because of 
His exquisitely sensitive nature. He knew what 
these things meant; He understood all the anxiety, 
the days and nights of torment, the hopelessness, the 
rage, the incubus of woe which, diseases of this kind 
had brought into the world. But He was not baffled 
by them. He stood unafraid in the presence of this 
panoramic spectacle of suffering which passed be- 
fore His vision day by day, and He said, "I will, be 
ye clean!" He thus became the establisher of the 
zvorld's philanthropy. He set into operation a spirit 
of sympathetic care, of skill, of devotion to human 
need and suffering, out of which have come hospitals, 
asylums, houses of refuge, homes for the unfortu- 
nate, and all the varied array of our modern schemes 
of compassion, charity, and reform. All these have 
their root in our Lord's works of healing. What we 
call to-day "social Christianity," the work of the 
Church and of the Churches among the poor, the 
care of the insane, the betterment of the conditions 
of labor, the elevation of the degraded, — all this may 



52 The Hungry Christ. 

be traced back in good part to the example and influ- 
ence of the healing ministry of Christ. By His cures 
He told the world that man had a body as well as a 
soul, and that disease and pain and sorrow were to 
be lightened and finally done away by His Gospel. 
It is still true, as Whittier has sung, 

"The healing of His seamless dress 
Is by our beds of pain ; 
We touch Him in life's throng and press; 
And we are whole again." 

There is still another aspect of Christ's miracles 
which we must glance at, — their typical character. 
They are types of His redemptive work on human 
souls, symbols of His renewing power as exerted 
from time to time upon the heart of the world. In 
this regard what beauty and meaning shine out of 
His mighty works ! The healing of the blind meant 
not only His compassion exercised upon the unfor- 
tunate then, but the age-long exercise of His regen- 
erative skill upon the blinded vision of our race. 
When Christ opened the deaf ear He shadowed forth 
His willingness and power to open the ear of the 
sinner in all lands and ages to discern the Father's 
voice and to hear the minstrelsies of the skies. When 
He made the lame to walk He suggested His ability 
to lead the feet of the crippled soul, renewed in 



MiracIvES: Meaning and Function. 53 

strength and re-created in beauty, into the path of 
life. When He cast out demons what else could He 
signify but that He was for evermore the rightful 
Sovereign of the soul, and that He could and would 
cast out the devils of pride and self-will and anger 
and greed from the heart of man? And when He 
raised the dead to life He pictured His power to 
quicken dead souls into life, to say to those who had 
been like Lazarus bound hand and foot and clad in 
grave clothes and buried under mountains of guilt 
and corruption, Arise, come forth and live! These 
indeed are greater marvels than the former. The 
work of lifting the ancient £>agan world out of its 
idolatries and lusts was a mightier work than the 
quieting of the storm, or the raising of the dead. In 
this aspect the miracles have a perpetual significance 
and suggestiveness. We see in them a never-ending 
portrayal of the redeeming mercy of Christ as going 
on in the world about us, — eyes opened, ears un- 
locked, tongues unmuzzled, crippled souls reformed, 
dead souls made alive again ! His miracles of heal- 
ing are a pictured Gospel of salvation for all men, 
everywhere. The spiritual power of the Gospel, 
which is its supreme characteristic, is typified by the 
physical miracles wrought by the Master. These 
miracles foretokened the triumphs of His grace in 



54 The Hungry Christ. 

its operations on the heart and life of our race in all 
the ages of time ! 

Why, it may be asked, are such miracles wrought 
no longer? Why does not some prophet appear to- 
day who can quiet a tempest by a word, or walk upon 
the angry waves of the sea, or resuscitate the dead ? 
Simply because these acts are no longer needed as 
credentials of the Gospel. They have done their 
work, achieved their mission. A candle is not needed 
when the sun is risen. This is noonday in the history 
of the scheme of salvation. Miracles belonged to a 
time when there was no New Testament ; when Christ 
was showing what He was, proving His claims, 
demonstrating His Divine character and works. To 
introduce miracles now would be like asking a full- 
grown man, after his college course, to sit down to 
study a primer. The miracles are the primitive ap- 
peal, the primary lesson, the pioneer method of edu- 
cating the race. They can not be enacted again! 
But in reality miracles larger and greater than those 
of the days of the Gospel scenes are being enacted 
day by day in our own time. The Master said, 
"Greater works shall ye do !" When men and women, 
hardened in sin, sold to the Evil One, are redeemed ; 
when they are washed from their sins and turned into 
saints; when character is transfigured again and 



Miracles : Meaning and Function. 55 

again into the image of the Redeemer; when the 
whole face of civilization is changed by His Word; 
when pagan nations are made to yearn for His great 
salvation, and cannibals are lifted out of their sav- 
agery and sin into purity and holiness; when men 
and women are revealed on every hand, bearing the 
likeness of the Master and willing to go to the ends 
of the earth in His name, and crying as did Isaiah, 
Here am I, send Me! — these miracles of grace are 
really as much credentials of Christ's Messiahship, of 
His Divine claims, as any miracle that He wrought 
on earth! 

There are some of you, perhaps, who have said, 
oflhand, as a friend remarked to me but recently in 
regard to this theme : "Miracles do not appeal to me. 
I accept Jesus Christ as my Lord, and I try to obey 
Him; but it has never seemed of much consequence 
to me whether He did or did not do the wonderful 
things ascribed to Him in the Gospels. They appear 
to me to be matters of a far distant age, with which 
I am not concerned." Such a judgment in respect 
to miracles may possibly answer, for the time being, 
in the quiet of the study, or in the familiar and un- 
studied conversational fellowship which a man may 
enjoy with his fellow. But there comes inevitably 
an hour in human experience when the soul cries 



56 The: Hungry Christ. 

out for a wonder-working Redeemer. The concep- 
tion of Christ as simply a great and stimulating 
Teacher will not then answer to the agonizing plea 
of the heart, or quiet its insistent cry for help. When 
a man is toiling under the burden of unforgiven sin ; 
when remorse weighs him down ; when loss and sor- 
row and disappointment and heartbreak and mani- 
fold forms of misery assail him ; when he is brought 
face to face with bereavement; when he is called 
upon to tread the declivities of life and to walk 
through the valley of the shadow of death, — then he 
feels his need of a Helper who is endowed with al- 
mighty power. Nothing short of that equipment 
will meet his needs. In view of the trials, the sins, 
the burdens, the griefs, and the temptations of life 
men are taught the value of the miracles of the Gos- 
pels as affording to them picturesque delineations of 
the manifold grace and helpfulness of the Redeemer 
of our race. Accordingly in such vicissitudes we 
may aptly cry out : "O Lord, I thank Thee for the 
wonderful works which Thou didst do when on the 
earth. Without them I would not dare to believe 
that Thou canst help me to the uttermost. I am glad 
that Thou didst heal the leper ; now I see that Thou 
canst renew the vileness of my inner life! I am 
glad that Thou didst open the eyes of the blind; 



MlRACXDS! MEANING AND FUNCTION. 57 

now I know that Thou canst grant unto me power 
to see the invisible ! I rejoice that Thou didst raise 
the dead; therefore I venture to bring to Thee a 
soul dead in trespasses and sins, confident that Thou 
canst restore it to spiritual life. It gives me new 
courage and hope to behold Thee walking the Sea 
of Galilee, and quelling the storm with a word ; now 
I can understand that Thou hast power to quiet 
the tumults of my soul, speak peace to my tempest- 
uous conscience, and quiet every stormy fear that 
sweeps over my sky! Comforted, encouraged, in- 
structed by these gracious works which Thou didst 
in Thine earthly ministry, O Lord, I dare to come 
to Thee. In these wonderful works I see the truth 
that Thou art mighty to save, that with Thee all 
things are possible, that there is nothing too hard 
for Thee to undertake! Thou hast all power in 
heaven and on earth. Let Thy miracle-working 
grace be used, O Christ, in the work of creating in 
me Thy likeness, and making me Thy child, Thy 
servant, Thy soldier, to do and suffer Thy will, in 
time and in eternity. Amen." 



IV. 

THE TRI-LINGUAL INSCRIPTION. 

"And Pilate wrote a title also and put it on the cross. 
And there was written, Jesus of Nazareth, the 
King of the Jews. This title . . . was written 
in Hebrew, and in Latin, and in Greek" — John 
xix, 19, 20. 

If you and I had been in Jerusalem looking for 
a King on the day of the Crucifixion, the man who 
is mentioned in the text is the last one we would have 
chosen. Like the other people that day, we might 
have hooted in derision at the idea suggested by the 
inscription over His cross. "That man a King; 
dying in shame and obloquy, without a friend; no 
crown except one of thorns ; no throne, no scepter, 
no retinue, no palace, no possessions — that man a 
King l" Thus we would have commented and gone 
on our way. And, now, as if to show how mistaken 
human judgments often are, and how the noblest and 
greatest are sometimes rejected of men, and how a 

58 



The Tri-Linguai, Inscription. 59 

real King can sometimes do without all the external 
signs of royalty, the redeemed in two worlds unite 
in singing: 

"Jesus, the name high over all, 
In hell or earth or sky ; 
Angels and men before it fall, 
And devils fear and fly." 

To-day He is recognized as King of kings and Lord 
of lords. We may well therefore consider the in- 
scription over His cross as signifying the extent 
and the character of His regal supremacy. 

Pilate little thought what he was doing that day 
when he directed this inscription to be prepared and 
placed over the dying man. Perhaps he thought to 
affix a stigma to the Jews themselves by parading 
before the whole of Jerusalem the public declaration 
that this so-called criminal, whom he had reluctantly 
condemned to die, was the alleged head of their na- 
tion. He wanted to mortify and humiliate them! 
Maybe he had a secret conviction that the claim was 
not altogether a fanciful one, and that this Galilean 
really was entitled to a throne and a crown ! When 
the Pharisees came and protested that he should not 
call Him the King of the Jews, but should write, 
"He said, I am the King of the Jews," he gruffly re- 
plied, "What I have written I have written." And so 
it stood, and so it stands to this day. Even the 



6o The Hungry Christ. 

malice and pettiness and spite of His enemies this 
King was able to use to His advantage. Accord- 
ingly the inscription intended in derision and hate 
became a world-wide proclamation of His majestic 
and regal greatness. 

I. Bach one of the evangelists tells of this in- 
scription, and each gives- a different version. Mark's 
is the shortest; it reads simply, "The King of the 
Jews." Luke adds two other words which help to 
make the proclamation emphatic : "This is the King 
of the Jews." Matthew puts in the name of our 
Lord, and his rendering reads, "This is Jesus the 
King of the Jews." John's is fullest of all, "Jesus of 
Nazareth, the King of the Jews." There is really 
no discrepancy here. The essential element in the 
inscription was the proclamation of His kingliness, 
and that is made in each one of the four. Perhaps 
the fact that the inscription was threefold, and that 
it was of necessity differently couched in the three 
languages explains the difference between the vari- 
ous renderings. These variations, however, afford 
us a sample of some of the so-called discrepancies 
that diversify the four Gospels — simply so many vari- 
eties of utterance which always occur between several 
honest and well-informed witnesses, each of whom 
gives the account of an occurrence or the version of 



The: Tri-Lingual Inscription. 6i 

a conversation as he recalls it. There is a personal 
equation to be reckoned with in the case; each man 
has his own standpoint, his own eye-and-ear impres- 
sions. And if the testimonies of the four witnesses 
in a court of justice cohere and coincide in the main, 
if they agree as to the essential points in the case, 
the minor disagreements are set aside as inevitable 
and immaterial. The unity and harmony of the 
Bible, as is evident in this case, are not to be found 
in mere verbal correspondencies. That unity is a 
substantial, a spiritual, an underlying and essential 
one. 

2. This inscription was written in three lan- 
guages. These were the great languages of that day 
and of all time. To all intents and purposes there- 
fore the proclamation was universal. No matter 
where a man came from that day to witness that exe- 
cution of these three men outside of the walls of 
Jerusalem, if he could read at all he was able to make 
out in the tongue which he was best acquainted with 
the fact that this man was called the King of the 
Jews. If he was a Hebrew he could read it in his 
own tongue; if he came from Greece, or from the 
isles of the sea, where the language of that country 
was spoken, he could still understand what the title 
meant; and if he was acquainted with the Latin 



62 The Hungry Christ. 

tongue, the language used in official circles, it was 
clear in that form of speech that this Man of Naza- 
reth was announced in some fashion to be a King. 
To-day that truth is written in four hundred lan- 
guages and dialects; it would seem as if this first 
proclamation of it on the cross had been intended to 
prelude the coming of the day when all speeches and 
languages and tongues and dialects should proclaim 
the kingliness and the royal authority of Jesus of 
Nazareth. 

A world-wide announcement of the Gospel pro- 
visions — this is what we may see in this trilingual 
title on the cross. Years afterward an apostle wrote 
in regard to this scene, He tasted death for every 
man. He also declared that God would have all men 
to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the 
truth. The Master Himself before He ascended to 
heaven commanded His disciples to go, make dis- 
ciples of all nations, — to go and preach the gospel to 
every creature. All this world-wide provision for 
human need and human sin was hinted at and an- 
nounced in the inscription written over the cross. 
Forgiveness for the civilized man and the savage, 
comfort for the sorrowing in all lands, hope for the 
lost everywhere, light for darkened homes in all 
climes, and joy for the desolate in all latitudes and 



The Tri-LinguaIv Inscription. 63 

all longitudes, salvation for the human race, in 
mountain or plain, in jungle or forest or hamlet, in 
city or country, on the continents or on the far-off 
isles of the sea, — this is the message of the title which 
Pilate wrote and placed above the cross where Jesus 
Christ suffered and died. 

There are heartache and heartbreak everywhere, 
and here is set forth a panacea for the universal 
heartache of the human race, — this is the record 
which we find in the inscription. A missionary in 
Manchuria has recently written a book telling of his 
experiences and labors in that far-off part of the 
world for the past thirty years. One fact he men- 
tions which may claim place just here. He says he 
has found among the Buddhists of that country men 
who have wandered far and wide, from shrine to 
shrine, from temple to temple, from sage and priest 
in one city to sage and priest in other cities, all with 
one aim — to find rest, to obtain inward peace. They 
have given away their possessions, inflicted upon 
themselves severe penances, gone upon weary pil- 
grimages, secluded themselves in caves in the desert, 
or in hermit cells in the gloomy and forbidding 
mountains, — all with one hope and purpose, to get 
rid of their burden of sin, to find something or Some- 
body, somewhere, who could appease their disquieted 



64 The Hungry Christ. 

consciences, disburden their souls of their load of 
conscious guilt, strike loose from their spirits the fet- 
ters of sin, give to them an assurance of hope and 
comfort in looking forward beyond the grave, and 
a power to face death without fear and to live a life 
of purity and victory here below. Their search has 
been in vain; they have found at no heathen shrine 
the peace which they sought. But again and again 
to such longing, forlorn, stricken, and despairing 
souls has come the message of the Gospel, uplifting 
them, renewing them, gladdening them, bringing 
them into conscious fellowship with the King. Thus 
in heathen lands to-day this proclamation made on 
the cross is being verified and fulfilled. 

3. This inscription was written in Hebrew, — that 
was a significant and typical fact. In that tongue 
God's great revelation had been made to patriarch 
and psalmist, priest and prophet. It was the lan- 
guage of worship, of religion, of faith, of religious 
aspiration and hope. In this language the law was 
written, and the psalms, those songs of praise and 
rapture, were composed and sung, and the history of 
the chosen people was embodied, and the characters 
of the Old Testament saints were enshrined. It is 
a deep, vital, intense, and majestic tongue, full of 
pathos, of sublimities, of poetical and tragic possi- 



Ths Tri-Linguai, Inscription. 65 

bilities, of tenderness and terror set over in contrast 
one to the other. It is a tongue of great simplicity, 
strong in its fundamental elements, which was 
molded, developed, enriched, and utilized almost 
from its beginning as the fitting vehicle of revelation, 
as the instrument of religion, as the medium through 
which Divine ideas and ideals should be revealed to 
the world. It was fitting therefore that the inscrip- 
tion over the cross of Jesus of Nazareth should be 
written in this tongue, so that it might be read by 
Jewish spectators; but with a further intent and aim, 
— that it might be declared in this way that this Man 
thus crucified was appointed to reign in the vast em- 
pire of religion, that He was to be the Guide of re- 
ligious aspiration, and the center of religious hope, 
and the object of worship, and the Ruler of the hu- 
man heart, from pole to pole, and from age to age, 
until time should end. Thus written in the Hebrew 
tongue this inscription contained an implied proph- 
ecy of the universal triumph of the Christian faith 
over all other systems and creeds. Standing by that 
cross and beholding the proclamation of Christ's 
kingship in the ancient language of the Jews, we may 
say to ourselves — That means that the Crescent shall 
fall before the Cross; that Confucianism shall find 
in the New Testament a morality which shall supple- 
5 



66 The; Hungry Christ. 

ment and purify its ethical standards ; that Buddhism 
shall abandon its monasteries and its asceticism and 
its myths, and embrace the Gospel of Christ; that 
Hinduism shall throw its idols to the owls and the 
moles and the bats, and accept Jesus of Nazareth 
as King, that the savageries and superstitions and de- 
basements of cannibal tribes and the low-down races 
shall be overcome and abandoned, and that every- 
where Jesus shall be enthroned and adored and wor- 
shiped. 

4. But this inscription was also written in the 
Greek language. That was a significant fact which 
needs to be studied. That tongue was the language 
of culture; it was the medium through which the 
Wise Men, the lovers of wisdom in that wonderful 
land of Greece, had given forth their utterances to 
the world. In that tongue the orators of Athens had 
spoken; in that tongue her philosophers had en- 
shrined their studies of the human mind; in it the 
poets and dramatists of the land had written their 
epics and their comedies and tragedies; in it in due 
time the Gospel had been and was to be preached, 
and in it the New Testament was to be written. It 
was in the highest sense the speech of the world of 
culture, of art, of poetry, of beauty. It was a singu- 
larly affluent, plastic, sinuous, musical, and symmet- 



This Tri-LinguaIv Inscription. 67 

rical tongue, rich in adjectives, in methods of modi- 
fication, in particles which shade off in the finest 
ways the meaning of speaker or writer. Like the 
pillars of the Grecian temples, solid as the rock and 
crowned with decorated capitals, the Greek language 
combined strength with artistic beauty. And in this 
tongue also the announcement that Jesus Christ is a 
King was made upon His cross ! 

This- fact was full of significance. It meant that in 
the peculiar realm over which the Greek tongue ruled 
our Lord was to reign as Supreme Sovereign. He 
was to conquer the wisdom, the art, the philosophy, 
the science, the culture of the world. He was to rule 
not only the heart of the common people, but the 
reason of the thinker and the brain of the scholar. 
He was to touch with quickening power the mind 
of the race, to stimulate to its highest flights the 
imagination of man, to rouse human genius to its 
loftiest achievements, and to extend His regal sway 
over school and college and library and museum and 
art gallery the wide world over. He was to impress 
everywhere the truth that man must love God with 
the mind as well as with the heart, that refined tastes 
and a disciplined intellect and increasing knowledge 
are a vital part of true religion, and that in the ad- 
vance to be made by the human race — advance in 



68 The Hungry Christ. 

discovery, invention, enterprise, and all forms of in- 
tellectual attainments, — Jesus Christ was to be the 
acknowledged leader, pattern, and guide. This in- 
scription in Greek was a foretoken of the age in 
which we live, in which Christianity has been plant- 
ing schools and building endowments, and lifting up 
the poor and kindling beacon fires of enlightenment 
on all the farther shores of the globe, and opening 
up visions of human capacity and destiny surpassing 
the dream of the poet or the sage ! 

5. This inscription, however, was also written in 
Latin, and that fact had its hidden and mystical 
meaning. Latin was the tongue of the official world, 
in which edicts were sent out from Rome, in which 
the courts rendered their judgments, and the laws 
were enshrined, and the generals reported their con- 
quests. It was the language of law, of government, 
of power. It represented Rome in its work of far- 
reaching exploration, discovery, and conquest. It 
spoke of that military power which had conquered 
the whole known world. In that sense it had a sym- 
bolic meaning, as we find it used on the cross to 
declare the kingship of Jesus of Nazareth. It signi- 
fied that the world of law, of government, of civiliza- 
tion, the political realm, the realm of orderly life, 
over which Rome then reigned, was to be the empire 



The; Tri-Linguai, Inscription. 69 

of this crucified Nazarene, and that in due time the 
laws and governments of the globe would be modi- 
fied and revolutionized and transformed according 
to His will so as to represent His teachings and His 
Gospel. 

How absolutely improbable that suggestion was, 
according to all human forethought and probability ! 
This Man, cast out and despised and rejected, dying 
in grief and reproach as a criminal, despised alike by 
Hebrew and Roman and Greek — He is to reign far 
and wide, conquering prejudice, winning allegiance, 
leavening thought, capturing one province and one 
throne after another, until at last the glad cry shall 
go forth through the universe, The kingdom of this 
world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of 
His Christ, and He shall reign for ever and ever. 
And that proclamation is being rapidly fulfilled under 
our own eyes. To-day two-thirds of the population 
and three- fourths of the earth's surface are under the 
control of the Christian nations. The ruling political 
ideas of our time are drawn from the Bible. The 
crucified Nazarene is already enthroned in the realm 
of law and government and political ideas. His 
Gospel has been the pioneer of human rights, cre- 
ating the conception of individual manhood and 
worth, and opening up for the poor, the needy, the 



70 The Hungry Christ. 

destitute, and the oppressed possibilities of help and 
hope never known before. 

6. Only one man in all the multitude that saw 
Jesus die recognized by faith His true character. In 
his dying agonies he heard the prayer of the Master 
for the men who were murdering Him; he beheld 
the self-poise, the patience, the composure, the peace, 
the inward serenity of this Galilean prisoner, and 
then he caught sight of the inscription, "Jesus of 
Nazareth the King!" Then he recalled all that he 
had heard of Jesus, — His kindness to the poor, His 
miracles on the sick, His tenderness to children, His 
mighty power over death, His authority over de- 
mons, — and that helped to bring out the meaning of 
the term. He pondered it till the very word ran like 
lightning through his brain — Jesus of Nazareth — 
the King. To the eyes of faith the dying Sufferer 
seemed like a King. "If He is a King He must have 
a kingdom — somewhere beyond the gates of Death. 
When He comes to His throne, may I be remem- 
bered." And then he uttered the prayer by which he 
is immortalized in the Gospel, Lord, remember me ! 
And this crucified and rejected King, fastened to the 
cross, dying in agony, still had strength enough to 
open the gates of Paradise to His companion in 
ignominy and pain : "To-day shalt thou be with Me 
in Paradise!" 



The; Tri-Linguai, Inscription. 71 

7. Once more: the lesson is suggested that real 
kingliness is a matter of character. George Wash- 
ington was as great in the time of his defeats and 
retreats and poverty and humiliation during the long 
and almost hopeless struggle of the Revolutionary 
War, as he was when at the head of the new Union 
as its first President. Columbus was just as ma- 
jestic in his long days of waiting and toil and wan- 
dering and struggle, as he was when Spain bowed 
at his feet and welcomed and feted him as the dis- 
coverer of a new world. And Jesus Christ was as 
great and majestic and worthy when He hung a 
bleeding, stricken, dying man on the cross, as He 
was when weeks afterward He ascended to the skies 
to receive the rapturous praises of the heavenly 
hosts. He was a King of sufferers, — He was en- 
rolled by the experiences of that awful day in the 
noble army of martyrs, He descended to the depths 
of human agony and woe, He felt the agony of de- 
sertion and absolute loneliness, He knew what it was 
to have His good name, His liberty, His life taken 
by force and fraud. And amid it all He was the 
supreme model of majesty, self-composure, patience, 
benignity. Kingliness does not consist in royal 
robes, in a splendid palace, in a golden scepter, in 
outward dignities and decorations. Kingliness is in 
the man, in the character, in the life. 



72 The; Hungry Christ. 

One final word: How safe are they who are in 
the keeping of this King ! He rules all realms ; His 
sway extends through all worlds ; He has conquered 
death and the grave ; all forces and laws and armies 
are in His hand. Who can harm those who in loy- 
alty and love have put their lives in His care ? Pros- 
perity and adversity, sickness and health, life and 
death, friends and foes, this world and the next, 
the body and the soul, — all are under His law and 
in His eye and hand. The prisoner may say, I am 
still under His care, in His own good time the doors 
will open and I shall walk at liberty. The sick man 
may say, I am safe in His hands; the dying may 
exclaim, Lord, Thou art my stay and my help ; Thou 
didst taste death for me, and Thou canst save unto 
the uttermost! 



¥. 

STRENGTH FOR THE DAY. 

"Thy bars shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, 
so shall thy strength be." — Deut. xxxiii, 25. 

The; precious words which I have read form a 
part of the blessing spoken by Moses before he took 
his departure from the people whom he had led 
through the wilderness of Arabia to the borders of 
the promised land. In this chapter he takes up each 
tribe, one by one, and gives to it a specific and char- 
acteristic blessing. In this attitude he reminds us 
of the dying patriarch, Jacob, who in like manner on 
his deathbed called before him his sons, outlined 
their future, warned them of their personal perils, 
prayed for them, and imparted to them his blessing. 
In the later instance Moses in this passage deals 
with the case of the tribe of Asher, who was the 
eighth son of Jacob. Both the blessings I have 
spoken of assure him of a happy lot. Jacob said of 
him, "His bread shall be fat, and he shall yield 

73 



74 The: Hungry Christ. 

royal dainties." And Moses, to cite the entire bless- 
ing, said : "Blessed be Asher with children : let him 
be acceptable unto his brethren, and let him dip his 
foot in oil. Thy bars shall be iron and brass; and 
as thy days, so shall thy strength be." These fore- 
casts of the tribal destiny of Asher were in part ful- 
filled when that part of Israel increased in numbers 
until it became something like a small nation; and 
when it entered upon its own inheritance in the land 
of Israel. It colonized and occupied the northern 
seaboard of the country, from Mt. Carmel to Zidon, 
reaching inland some twenty or thirty miles, and 
including a good proportion of fertile soil and many 
miles of territory suitable for grazing, fruit raising, 
and the culture of the olive. Indeed to this day 
orange orchards and groves of olive-trees and vast 
fields of wheat cover a good part of this ancient in- 
heritance of the tribe of Asher. 

The passage is difficult because of obscurity in the 
original, and yet perhaps the meaning may be made 
clear enough. Asher was to be happy in the esteem 
of his brethren, a sort of a favorite brother. He was 
to dip his foot in oil, in the sense that his territory 
should overflow with the fruit of the olive-tree; the 
royal dainties might well be considered to be the figs 
and oranges and other tropical fruits which grow in 



Strength for the Day. 75 

abundance in his territory to this day. The words, 
''Thy bars shall be iron and brass/' read in the ordi- 
nary version, "Thy shoes shall be iron and brass," 
and in that form are considered to mean that he 
would be provided with foot gear to suit the rocky 
hill country in which he was to live. A better ren- 
dering is that of the Revised Version, — Bars, a term 
applicable to the frontier region of the land which 
he occupied. His neighbors on the north would be 
the Phenicians, adventurous, warlike, brave, and 
inclined to be troublesome. Against them he would 
have bolts and bars of iron and bronze, great moun- 
tain barriers, for protection, — symbols of the safety 
afforded to him in his exposed position by the pro- 
tection of the God of Israel. This brings us to the 
precious and most characteristic part of the passage, 
the wonderful promise given to Asher, and through 
him to all believers, "As thy days, so shall thy 
strength be," clearly one of the most tender and 
comprehensive of all the gracious promises which 
God has given His people. 

If a record of this promise could have been kept, 
what a wonderful showing it would make ! What 
tears it has dried, what hearts it has comforted, what 
heroes it has inspired, what homes clouded in want 
and suffering and fear it has illuminated with hope 



76 The; Hungry Christ. 

and peace, what martyrs it has heartened for their 
final testing hour! To the people of Israel it came 
with peculiar force in many an exigent time of dan- 
ger and need. When they faced days of battle and 
peril, when their enemies pressed on them from 
every side, when their rulers proved incapable and 
wicked, and their priests came to be hypocritical and 
careless, when they were defeated by their foes and 
led away into exile, and afflicted in a strange land, — 
and in many another vicissitude of trial and care 
and national misfortune there came to the faithful 
of the land this blessed promise, As thy days, so 
shall thy strength be ! 

But the most effective ministry of the passage 
has been, doubtless, not to the nation as a body, but 
to the individual believer. What vast multitudes 
of faithful and believing men and women this pas- 
sage has consoled in sorrow, and encouraged in 
want, and built up in adversity; what prisons and 
hospitals and asylums it has cheered by its wonder- 
ful revelation of helpfulness and blessing; what 
orphans it has ministered to in their solitude and 
sorrow; into how many dismal midnights of deso- 
lation and poverty it has poured exhaustless sun- 
shine ; w T hat cooling draughts of water it has brought 
to those who were dying in .the hot sands of the 



Strength for the; Day. 77 

desert ! What testimonies it has made possible ! O, 
if all who have found this ancient text a fountain of 
comfort and of joy could speak, the universe would 
be vocal with their testimonies ! Saints on earth and 
myriads more in the skies would join in saying, 
"My day was a day of darkness, this text filled it 
with light. It was a day of suffering, and by the 
help of this promise I passed through it without 
flinching ; a day of burdens, and I was enabled to 
bear them; a day of peril, and my heart was filled 
with courage; a day of exhausting labor, and I was 
inspired with strength adequate to all its needs. We 
certify by all that we have and hope for that this 
promise is balm for broken hearts, and help for the 
defeated and the prostrate and the despairing, and 
life for the dying !" 

The word day, as used in the text, is sometimes 
most fitly employed in the Bible and in poetry as a 
symbol of the entire period of human life. The Mas- 
ter, for example, applied it to the period of His active 
ministry when He said, We must work while it is 
day, the night cometh. Again the Wise Man says, 
In the morning sow thy seed, and at eve withhold 
not thy hand. And of one who had died in untimely 
fashion the Hebrew poet said, Her sun has gone 
down while it is yet day. It is a beautiful and an 



78 The Hungry Christ. 

appropriate symbol. Human life, like a day, has a 
dawn ; childhood, with its gleefulness, and its perils, 
and its shortsightedness and need of protection, and 
of care. It has its morning; youth, joyous, songful, 
gladdening, hopeful. It has its noontide; middle 
life, with its growing burdens, and its new sense of 
responsibility, its fresh series of unexpected temp- 
tations and sorrows, its own peculiar assailments. It 
has its evening time; old age, with its infirmities, 
its benignities, its adversities, its failing strength, 
and its new hopes of immortality. So this precious 
promise has its striking application to the whole 
period of life under the figure of a day. As thy 
day, — in childhood, youth, middle life, old age, — so 
shall thy strength be ! That is, God will proportion 
grace and comfort and help to the various experi- 
ences and vicissitudes through which His people are 
called to pass. They shall have seasonable help, 
succor in time of peculiar need, and whatever may 
be their trials and adversities, they shall have suit- 
able strength to meet them. 

This passage is peculiarly fitted to encourage and 
help the timid and self-distrustful to undertake the 
duties and start upon the profession of the Christian 
life. Many a man and woman looks with doubt and 
fear upon the life of the Christian, and says : "I am 



Strength for the Day. 79 

afraid I could not hold out. The duties are so se- 
vere, the trials so heavy, the self-denials so many, 
the standard so high ! I would not want to fail. I 
fear that should I begin I would not be able to keep 
on, and I would bring disgrace on the profession of 
religion." Thus like the slothful man in the Book 
of Proverbs they cry out continually, "There is a 
lion in the road. I shall be slain if I venture out." 
Life is often wasted by this policy, the years slip by 
and the time of activity passes with them, and no 
forward step is taken into the kingdom. Sometimes 
those who talk thus are conscientious, upright, and 
to an extent devout souls, to whom the public pro- 
fession of religion has long been a bugbear. How 
encouraging and gracious to them should the pre- 
cious words of the text come, As thy days, so shall 
thy strength be ! With each temptation, need, trial, 
or hardship or peril, a full measure of strength and 
help will be administered. Be not doubtful, despair- 
ing, timid any longer! Make a venture by faith, 
and begin the new life ! 

A further application of these words to those who 
confront long and exacting periods of toil ought to 
bring help and comfort. Life to most people who 
amount to anything is a workshop, and not a play- 
room. It is a scene of taxing labor, of tedious and 



80 The; Hungry Christ. 

endless and uninspiring toil. The question of bread 
and butter, of making provision for dependent ones, 
of getting a home, and of making the best use of 
one's time and gifts, — these must all be faced and 
answered. Sometimes a look ahead reveals no sign 
of a let-up in the case, no hint of an oasis in the 
desert of hard labor, no sheltered nook where one 
may retreat for a time; the whole horizon contains 
in large letters just one word manifolded every- 
where — work, work, work. How can I stand it! 
cries out the overburdened toiler. A year means 
more than three hundred days of toil, ten years mean 
more than three thousand! Well, you could not 
stand it if by any process of compression these days 
were packed together, half a dozen in one ; then you 
would give out. But you are to meet them one by 
one, and as each one comes it will bring with it due 
provision of strength and grace for its toils. Each 
day's duty well done gives skill and confidence and 
added force for the next one. We are to live by 
the day, accepting the task, the burden, the disap- 
pointment, the opportunity, as they come, assured 
that by this promise and other precious ones our im- 
mediate and daily needs will be met. Thus the toiler 
will have, day by day, strength for meeting his al- 
lotment of work. 



Strength for the; Day. 8i 

The peculiar thing that is promised here is 
strength, one of the most needed and most precious 
of Divine furnishings. He shall strengthen thy 
heart, is the assurance given by the psalmist to those 
who have faith and hope and courage. St. Paul's 
prayer for the Ephesians began with a supplication 
for strength: "I bow my knees unto the Father — that 
He would grant you, according to the riches of His 
glory, that ye may be strengthened with power 
through His Spirit in the inward man." That, the 
apostle knew, was a radical need of all men. There 
are burdens to bear, temptations to meet, sorrows to 
face, responsibilities to carry, labors to be achieved, 
aims to be accomplished, — and for all these strength 
is the one thing needful. An overtaxed woman was 
once heard to groan to herself this prayer : "O Lord, 
make me as strong as a horse and give me two pair 
of hands, or I can not get through all the work that 
has been piled upon me!" Many another has felt 
like uttering perhaps a similar wish. Blessed indeed 
is the provision for our weakness, our toils, our hard 
driven faculties, in this promise that strength as the 
day may require will be afforded. 

The promise furthermore hints at various sorts 
of strength that are required by the variety of hu- 
man experiences. The strength to be imparted and 
6 



82 The Hungry Christ. 

provided will be as varied as the needs of the day. 
To work hard, week in and week out, and find but 
little return for it — that requires one sort of strength. 
To meet without flinching some hitherto unexampled 
blow, of loss, or bereavement, or peril, or trial, and 
keep up courage and not lose heart or patience or 
faith — that needs another sort of strength. To be 
put by the divine order into a furnace of affliction 
heated seven times hotter than before, and to stay 
there, week after week, without complaining, hope- 
less of relief until life shall end — that calls for still 
another sort. Hence we may understand what the 
prophet means when he assures us that those who 
wait on the Lord shall renew their strength — change 
it for each emergency, get a new sort of strength 
from the Divine storehouse of power. 

" For faith can make the desert bloom, 
And through the vistas dim 
Love sees, in sunlight or in gloom, 
All pathways lead to Him." 

Then what comfort this passage contains for 
those whose brooding temperament or physical mal- 
adies make them prone to look on the dark side, to 
anticipate dismal happenings, to look into the future 
with forebodings, depressions, and overmastering 
anxieties ! To this distorted vision there is always 



Strength for the; Day. 83 

something dreadful to happen just down the road — 
there is a sy/ollen stream to swallow them up, or 
there are wild beasts lying in wait to devour, or 
numberless calamities just ready to overwhelm. O 
troubled soul, are you here to-day with your brood- 
ing, questioning thoughts, and your beclouded soul, 
your sky covered with darkness and the horizon 
everywhere betokening coming disaster? Your ba- 
rometer always says, There 's a tempest a-coming. 
But God says to you if you trust and obey Him, 
You shall have strength for the days to come ! The 
Master has warned us not to be overanxious about 
the morrow. Let these precious words quiet your 
alarms and calm your inward perturbations and 
gladden your sorrowing soul ! 



VI. 

THE SOUL DAMAGED BY SIN. 

"He that sinneth against me wrongeth his own soul/' 
— Prov. viii, 36. 

My aim is to set before you two or three of the 
inevitable effects wrought by sin in the soul of him 
who cherishes it. To portray in detail the damages 
which sin works in human nature is a task which 
will require the revelations of the last judgment to 
accomplish. Only omniscience can discern in full 
the destructions of sin, as wrought in the moral 
character of the sinner. The most solemn word in 
our language is used to suggest and picture it to our 
thought — the word death. Sin means death to the 
human soul; death to its higher functions, to its 
peace, to its noblest possibilities; demoralization, 
overthrow, shipwreck, of all its powers! 

In order to be definite, and bring my message 
within the limits of this service, I have chosen from 
the vast field thus opened up three phases of the 



The; Soui, Damaged by Sin. 85 

damage wrought by sin in the human soul, to which 
I invite your attention — three of the most perilous 
and insidious characteristics of sin's operations in 
the heart. Let us, without further parley, study 
them. 

1. Delusion is one of the first effects of sin, which 
has a deceiving and infatuating influence, clothing 
it with infinite peril. A mere glance at the tempta- 
tions—the typical temptations in the Word of God — 
will reveal this aspect of sin with startling vividness. 

Emphasis is laid upon this phase of sin in many 
parts of the Bible. In Eden the tempter pictured 
with deceitful artfulness the attractiveness of the 
forbidden fruit,- — "Your eyes shall be opened, ye 
shall see as gods !" The woman saw th$t the fruit 
was good for food, pleasant to the eyes, to be de- 
sired to make one wise ; — all these phases of sin were 
set before the tempted one in that hour of danger. 
The same policy has been pursued ever since. 
Against it we are warned in all parts of the Scrip- 
ture. We are told that Satan arrays himself as an 
angel of light, that he uses devices, wiles, snares ; 
that his followers hunt men with a net, — that they 
set traps to catch men ! St. Paul exhorts us lest we 
be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin — thus, 
through the Word God's messengers lift up the 



86 The Hungry Christ. 

warning cry of danger in regard to the delusive 
power of sin in the human soul, while it is said of 
Satan that he deceiveth the whole world, — and that 
he is a liar from the beginning. 

No man can study his own heart, can exercise 
the slightest bit of wisdom in the inspection of his 
inner life without realizing that sin has a perilously 
fascinating power. It gilds itself with an appear- 
ance of value, it puts on a cloak of allurement, it 
assumes a saintlike halo about its head, it garbs 
itself with romantic, and picturesque, and beautiful 
phases, which make it full of bewildering danger. 
Who hath bewitched you? was the cry of expostu- 
lation of Paul to the Galatians when he found them 
drawn aside into certain forms of sin. The word 
was well chosen — sin is bewitching in the magic 
spell that it weaves about its victims. Achan, drawn 
by the wedge of gold, and the goodly Babylonish 
garments, in the camp of the foe, forgot under the 
fascinations of the spoils that he beheld that these 
were forbidden things — he saw only the glitter of 
the gold, the radiant and gorgeous colors of the 
robe, — and forgot all else. 

The glare, the veneering, the gilt, the varnish of 
sin, constitutes much of its peril. If our eyes were 
always open to the deadly nature of sin, — if we 



The Souiv Damaged by Sin. 87 

would remember its deceitfulness, its power to en- 
chant, and bedevil, to put a spell on the reason, and 
derange the judgment, and entrance the imagination, 
and fool all our faculties, — the illusions, the charms, 
the mesmeric attraction of sin, — the weird, but dan- 
gerous loveliness of sin, — we should be safe. Against 
romantic and picturesque sins we have need to be 
on our guard, against the sins that appear palatable 
and alluring and beautiful — so that their deadly 
character is hidden. There is a "magic thrall" in 
them that is full of peril. 

The fictitious literature of the hour is full of this 
sort of attraction. Sins that are as vile as leprosy, 
as venomous as a rattlesnake, as corrosive as aqua 
fortis, — that burn like fire, and eat like an acid, and 
devour like a wild beast, that are as rapacious as the 
grave and as relentless as death — are pictured in 
many a novel of to-day in bewitching colors, so as 
to seem harmless, delightful, full of lofty pleasure. 
The danger lies right here — the imagination is easily 
led astray. The glitter is specious, the colors are 
only cheap paint daubed on to hide the inherent, in- 
evitable, ghastly ugliness of sin. We must be on 
our guard against sins that are artistically draped, 
and romantically disguised, and picturesquely fash- 
ioned. There is a deadly infatuation in them, there 



88 The: Hungry Christ. 

is a mental and moral hallucination about them that 
is destructive to all that is noble and holy in the soul. 
Mazed, maddened, infatuated, is the man who allows 
himself to be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 
All the vices are of this sort, — all the doubtful 
amusements are of this kind. The danger lies hid- 
den, in a subtle, aesthetic, romantic picturesqueness, 
that gives them their charm and their peril. It is 
said of the prodigal that he came to himself! He 
had been beside himself, in a craze, a delirium, a fit 
of madness. His experience had been a delusive, 
deceitful one, — his career had been one of infatu- 
ation. It is thus with every sinner! When Satan 
has placed before the eye of the tempted his glitter- 
ing wares — has pictured the pleasures of sin, — hid- 
ing the fact that they are but for a season, when he 
has dazzled the imagination, and befooled the judg- 
ment, and blinded the eyes, and hoodwinked the 
reason, how he must laugh at his victims, how he 
must hold them in derision, when he sees them biting 
at all his baits, and greedily swallowing them down, 
without question, — hewing out for themselves broken 
cisterns that can hold no water, — striving to fill 
themselves with husks, or crying, in view of their 
well-filled barns and overflowing fields, I have much 
goods laid up for many years,-^-! will eat, drink, and 



The Souiv Damaged by Sin. 89 

be merry ! How all the corridors of perdition must 
echo with the sound of demoniac laughter at the 
sight of reasonable beings, deluded, crazed, with the 
malignant power of sin ! This, then, is one inevi- 
table result of sin, — the entrance of delusion, infatu- 
ation, deceits, and fraud into the soul. Satan con- 
quers by beguiling, by inveigling, and ensnaring his 
victims. He alone is safe who can say, "I am not 
ignorant of the devices of the devil !" 

2. Another one of the fruits of transgression is 
the benumbing of moral sensibility. The apostle 
suggests, in one of his allusions to this phase of sin, 
that it first deceives and then hardens. He tells of 
those whose consciences are seared as with a red- 
hot iron, and of others who are past feeling. The 
types of character thus brought to view live among 
us to-day, — their consciences cauterized, their feel- 
ings torpid, their sensibilities frozen, their hearts 
like stone ! It was reckoned as the climax of the sin 
of Israel in the olden time, that they had ceased to 
be ashamed of their iniquity. Jeremiah says (vi, 15 ; 
viii, 12), "Were they ashamed when they had com- 
mitted abomination? Nay, they were not at all 
ashamed, neither could they blush." And on ac- 
count of their shameless spirit, their unblushing sin- 
fulness, the judgment of God swept them from the 



90 The; Hungry Christ. 

face of the earth. This soporific power of sin, — this 
power of putting the conscience to sleep, of lulling 
the reason into slumber, of soothing by moral opiates 
the -sensibilities of the soul, is fraught with inde- 
scribable peril. 

When the Master tells us that we must be con- 
verted and become like little children, this is one of 
His meanings, that our moral sensibilities are to be 
made tender, sensitive, and easily moved, that the 
heart is to be gentle and responsive to the touch and 
whisper of grace, that the soul is to be childlike in 
delicacy of feeling. This is the disposition which 
the poet had in mind when he wrote the hymn : 

" Quick as the apple of the eye, 
O God, my conscience make, 
Swift to discern when sin is nigh, 
And keep it still awake !" 

The sinner needs to return to the moral suscep- 
tibility of childhood — to its plasticity, and sensi- 
tiveness. 

Instead of seeking, however, more sensitiveness, 
the effort of many is to seek for means to stifle feel- 
ing, and render the conscience callous. That word 
callous has in it a meaning we may well ponder. 
If we chance to use a tool which chafes and abrades 
the hand, the worn skin becomes inflamed and keenly 



The Souiy Damaged by Sin. 91 

sensitive for the time. In a little while, if we con- 
tinue to expose the abraded surface to attrition, na- 
ture rallies to produce a thicker covering for the 
exposed surface — a hornlike cuticle, — a callous and 
insensible skin. In like manner the conscience be- 
comes tender, under the operations of Providence 
and grace; but when these instrumentalities are re- 
fused, and despised, — if, in spite of warning and 
conviction and remorse, the man persists in his 
wickedness, then the conscience becomes covered 
with a calloused surface ; the moral hide of the man 
becomes pachydermatous, — thick, like that of a rhi- 
noceros; and at last he is hardened and set in his 
ways! 

One of the common methods by which this is ac- 
complished is the evasion and refusal of plain duty 
for a considerable length of time. Let God set a 
duty before the eye, and impress it upon the heart ; 
let the conscience face it, and be impressed by it; 
and then wriggle, and twist, and evade, and excuse 
itself, and finally refuse to perform what God has 
placed in its path as an obligation — then will surely 
come this hardening of the moral nature, this in- 
duration of the conscience, this estate in which the 
feelings become obtuse, the sensibilities dulled, and 
the emotions iron-clad, and the whole nature is 
stricken with the blight of moral apathy. 



92 Ths Hungry Christ. 

The use of anaesthetics in surgery is one of the 
blessings of our civilization, but the use of moral 
anaesthetics, of spiritual opiates to deaden pain and 
lessen conviction and blunt the tenderness of the 
soul, is one of the most dreadful offenses which man 
commits against himself and against God. The lack 
of feeling ought to be a sign of alarm to the soul. 
"I have no feeling," is the excuse for not coming to 
Christ ; instead of that it ought to be the reason for 
coming with the cry: "Renew feeling, give back 
sensibility, destroy this apathy, forgive this moral 
obtuseness, this insensibility to Christ and duty and 
the things that have to do with peace !" What folly 
to say : "I know I am a sinner ; I am in theory a be- 
liever in the gospel; and I know that Christ is the 
only Savior; I know that if I die in my sins I shall 
be lost; I know that time is short, and death may 
come any moment, and that all my life ought to be 
dedicated to God at once — and yet I have no feeling, 
and practically I do not care 1" These symptoms in 
the case of physical disease mean that mortification 
has set in — and that heroic treatment, the cutting off 
of a diseased limb, or the cutting out of a diseased 
portion of flesh from the body is the only way of 
relief. To be stolid and indifferent, in view of duty 
and danger, in view of Christ and His work in our 



The; Souiv Damaged by Sin. 93 

behalf, in view of what we are and ought to be, — is 
a dreadful crime. There are men who once trembled 
at the warnings of the Word, and grew alarmed as 
they thought of the future ; and once in a while wept 
over their sins. But now their cheeks are brazen, 
and have lost the power even to blush; their souls 
are hardened, their hearts are insensible. 

There are many grievous losses that may come 
to us — the loss of property, of health, of reputation, 
of fame, of friends, of children, of home — but the 
greatest loss is the loss of moral sensibility, the loss 
of conviction, the loss of tenderness, that comes from 
the smothering of conscience, the stifling of emotion, 
the benumbing of the powers that ought to be su- 
preme in the soul. This estate of moral stupefaction 
and obtuseness, of spiritual apathy, of religious sto- 
lidity, is an alarming estate, indicating that life is 
almost extinct, that the rigors of winter, almost to 
death, reign in the soul ! 

3. Further: Sin in the human soul is an element 
of moral weakness; it involves the depletion of 
strength, the disintegration of the foundations of 
strong and virile character. The Psalmist, when he 
said, in his consciousness of sin, "I am as a man 
that hath no strength," only spoke the universal ex- 
perience of the transgressor, who finds himself de- 



94 The Hungry Christ. 

moralized, weakened, undermined by his iniquities. 
Paul describes the condition of the ungodly as "with- 
out strength." He recognizes the fundamental need 
of the human heart in his prayer for the Ephesian 
Church, in which his first petition is that they may 
be strengthened with might by Divine power in the 
inner man. Our Savior also recognized the basal 
need of our life when He made His promise to His 
disciples and to His Church, — "Ye shall receive 
power." Strength, power, — these are crying needs, 
urgent wants of the human soul, in view of the 
weakness wrought by sin in all the faculties ! 

Strength is an essential factor of noble and com- 
plete symmetrical manhood. St. John said, "I write 
unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and 
have overcome the wicked one, and the Word of 
God abideth in you." Strength, showing itself in 
a heroic purpose, fortitude in time of adversity, 
patience in suffering, — strength to control appetite, 
passion, and temper ; strength that holds on its way 
undismayed by danger or temptation ; strength that 
is equally able to endure and to fight, that is not 
afraid of the world, the flesh, or the devil, — this rad- 
ical quality, this fundamental element in noble char- 
acter, is overthrown and disintegrated by sin. The 
backbone is the essential feature of vertebrates, — 



The; Soui, Damaged by Sin. 95 

marking them off from a vast multitude of meaner 
and weaker animals. The first vague, structural 
promise of a backbone, — a mere anatomical hint, — 
that appeared countless ages ago, foreshadowing the 
appearance of a vertebral column in due course of 
time, — was a prophecy of coming greatness. When 
that structure actually appeared it became at once 
a sign of superiority in the animal creation, which 
reaches its culmination in man, the crown and climax 
of the vertebrates. 

There is, however, in character, as well as in the 
body, a backbone, against which iniquity exerts its 
damaging work. Sin attacks the spinal column of 
moral manhood, and eviscerates its very marrow, 
reducing man from an upright being with a verte- 
bral structure, to a creature prostrate and groveling 
and molluscous, — in intellect and conscience an in- 
vertebrate! Souls that were intended to have and 
develop the capacity of giants, of heroes, — are re- 
duced to dwarfs and weaklings by sin, which brings 
enervation into every faculty, breaks down every 
power and debilitates the whole man! Sin means 
the evisceration of character, the emasculation of 
will-power, the depletion of courage, the disintegra- 
tion of purpose, and the collapse of manhood! In 
the gospel the paralytic, helpless, prostrate, lying 



96 The Hungry Christ. 

speechless and fainting on his couch, borne by his 
friends to the feet of Jesus, is a picture of the dis- 
mantled estate into which sin brings the human soul. 
The man with his right hand withered is another 
type of this moral decrepitude, this withering and 
blighting of the soul by sin, — the executive power, 
the hand that works, the most useful and helpful of 
all the organs, stricken into uselessness and impo- 
tence ! 

Grace brings health, strength, and beauty to the 
soul, but sin involves demoralization and disintegra- 
tion to all the elements of manly and noble character. 

In one word, — Sin deceives, benumbs, and dis- 
mantles the soul ! 

Nor is this all. Were the preacher to complete 
the story, he would tell you of the imagination de- 
filed, degraded, turned into an instrument of corrup- 
tion and vice ; of the heart inflamed with the love of 
sin ; of the desires enamored of sin ; of the enslave- 
ment of every faculty, the debasement of every 
power ! He would tell you of the wretchedness and 
the despair which at least occasionally come to the 
soul when, by the illumination of the Holy Ghost, 
it is made conscious for the time of its danger, its 
guilt, its lost estate, its high lineage, the nobler na- 
ture of which it is made, the higher destinies for 



The Soui, Damaged by Sin. 97 

which it was created, and the plight into which it 
has fallen ! He would tell you of the hours of battle 
in the human soul when fear darkens every window, 
when remorse fastens its tooth into the quick of the 
conscience, when despair broods with stifling power 
over every faculty, when the ligaments of strength 
are hamstrung, and the wings are all clipped by 
which we were made to fly, and when a desperate 
conviction of servitude, of degradation, of doom, 
fixes itself in the oppressed and benighted heart. 
Even then one would fail to give you any adequate 
idea of the damages wrought by sin in our nature, 
damages which are irreparable but for the recon- 
structive grace of the Gospel ! 

When the Roman Empire was overrun by the 
Goths and Vandals centuries ago, destruction of 
works of art — the accumulation of ages of industry 
on the part of the great architects and painters and 
sculptors of preceding ages — marked the progress of 
the invading barbarians wherever they marched. 
With mace and ax, with spear and battering ram, 
they defaced, desecrated, and demolished the choic- 
est buildings, the noblest pictures, the most splendid 
statues ! Their march through Italy was made mem- 
orable by the appalling work of destruction which 
attended every foot of their journey. Cathedrals 
7 



98 The Hungry Christ. 

were sacked, art galleries were pillaged, museums 
were destroyed, and the most beautiful sculptures 
were broken in pieces with ruthless hand. 

All the artists that followed that age of devasta- 
tion could not have reproduced the priceless artistic 
treasures that were broken and burnt. 

But what was that havoc compared with the de- 
struction wrought in the soul of man by sin, — God's 
image marred, moral fiber corroded and destroyed, 
heroic capacities and faculties wasted and degraded ; 
sin, with torch and ax, laying waste, cutting down, 
blighting, ruining, the noblest creature that God has 
made — man created in His own divine likeness, — 
disfiguring and destroying moral manhood and wo- 
manhood, so that the soul which was made for com- 
munion with its Maker, and for loyal service to its 
Lord, becomes a prodigal and an outcast, an alien 
from the commonwealth of Israel and a stranger to 
the covenants of promise, without God and without 
hope in the world ! 



VII. 

GOD'S SIGNALS FOR A FORWARD MOVE- 
MENT. 

"And it shall be, When thou hearest the sound of 
marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees, that 
then thou shalt bestir thyself: for then is Jehovah 
gone out before thee to smite the host of the 
Philistines." — 2 Sam. v, 24. 

The incident in the midst of which these words 
are set is so short and simple, that we need be de- 
layed by it but a moment. David was waging a 
campaign against the savage and inveterate foes of 
Israel, the Philistines. When he had marshaled his 
troops and arrayed them for battle he did as many 
another great general has done, he took his case to 
the headquarters of the universe, and besought di- 
rection and help from the Almighty. As we see this 
great warrior kneel in prayer before he engages in 
battle, we think of Joshua, the leader who colonized 
Canaan; and Cromwell, who taught his armies to 

99 

LofC. 



ioo The Hungry Christ. 

pray as well as fight ; and Havelock, noted alike for 
gentleness of character, power in prayer, and skill 
on the battlefield; and Stanley in Darkest Africa. 
None of them felt that they could get along without 
prayer. David on his knees pleading — and David at 
the head of his troops fighting — the two pictures go 
together. They match and supplement each other. 
They tell you to take your plans and your work to 
God. Shape the plan of battle; organize your 
forces ; exercise all your wits, use all your energies, 
command all your resources for your enterprise, but 
before you venture forth to strike commend yourself 
and your life and labor to the Captain of your sal- 
vation. Seek for His blessing and sanction and di- 
rection. Lay your sword at His feet, on His altar 
first, and then you may go forth to battle, crying as 
of old, The sword of the Lord and of Gideon. 

But, to return to David, — in answer to his prayer 
the words of the text and context were spoken, tell- 
ing him to move in a circuit, opposite certain mul- 
berry-trees. Then he was to await the "sound of 
marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees :" when 
he heard that he was to bestir himself. That sound 
was to be to him a sign that God was on the march 
against the enemy; that the hour was come for he- 
roic action; that the opportune moment to strike a 
decisive blow had arrived. 



Signals for a Forward Movement, ioi 

David obeyed the command, and won a great 
victory. What that sound of marching in the tops 
of the mulberry-trees was, nobody can tell. It may 
have been the movement of angelic armies, poised 
in the viewless air; it may have been simply the 
rustling of the leaves at daybreak as a sign to David 
of God's watchful and helpful presence in that exi- 
gent hour. But the words and circumstances com- 
bined may be framed into a fit lesson for our day. 
"The sound of marching in the tops of the mulberry- 
trees" may be taken to symbolize any striking inter- 
position of God in human affairs. When you hear 
that sound, — in the heart, in the church, in the home, 
on your journeys, in the affairs of the nation — then 
bestir yourself! Then is the special time to work. 
That is the opportune, critical, exigent, all-deciding 
hour for thee. Watch for such times, and when 
their light dawns upon thee, and their clarion call 
sounds in thine ear, then with all the energy of thy 
soul, bestir thyself! Go out to battle and to vic- 
tory! 

I. This sound of marching in the tops of the 
mulberry-trees is often heard by a nation. It sounds 
a trumpet call to a whole people to bestir themselves. 
It gives them a signal that God is interposing in a 
special way in their affairs. It awakens a responsive 
cry, a co-operative effort, an obedient and united 



io2 The Hungry Christ. 

and heroic endeavor to accomplish a great work for 
the nation. For example, three hundred years ago 
when Holland under William the Prince of Orange 
was confronted by the armies of the strongest nation 
in Europe, under Philip the Second and the infamous 
Duke of Alva, what was it that united the Nether- 
lands into one solid phalanx, so that men, women, 
and children, in the inspiration of the hour, cried 
out : "Our lands may be laid waste by the sea, our 
cities scourged by the pestilence, our homes be de- 
stroyed over our heads, and ourselves slain on the 
battlefield or starved to death in our fever-smit- 
ten, famine-stricken besieged cities; we will meet 
death in his most frightful forms, but we will not 
submit to the tyranny of Spain and allow her to 
gag our mouths and strait jacket our consciences, 
and stultify our reason !" What, I say, was it that 
roused this little nation to such a pitch of fortitude 
and courage in that hour of poverty and trial? It 
was the conviction that God was with them, that 
they were fighting His battles for religious freedom 
and the rights of conscience. They heard the sound 
of marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees, and 
bestirred themselves. And in later struggles for hu- 
man rights the same principle holds good. When 
two hundred and fifty years ago the English people 
rose up in their majesty and smote down the mon- 



Signals for a Forward Movement. 103 

arch who had arrogated to himself the absolute 
power to rule, settling forever the principle that the 
representatives of the people, and not the scepter 
and the throne, constitute the supreme power in the 
land; when a century ago the American Colonies 
established by their Revolution the right of a Re- 
public to live; when, in a later day, the nation, 
after four years of war, determined that the Union 
was built to last forever, and when in the same con- 
flict the people became inflamed with the thought 
that freedom for all men, of all classes, races, and 
conditions, must be established by the sacrifice of 
the slain — in all these revolutions there was the 
sound of marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees, 
a revelation of the divine agency and ruling power 
among men. One of our poets has put this thought 
into one of our most glorious poems : 

" Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord : 
He is trampling ont the vintage where the grapes of wrath 

are stored; 
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift 
sword : 

His truth is marching on. 

I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling 

camps ; 
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and 

damps ; 
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring 

lamps ; 

His day is marching on. 



104 The Hungry Christ. 

I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel : 
'As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace 

shall deal; 
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with His 

heel, 

Since God is marching on.' 

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call 

retreat ; 
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment 

seat. 
O! be swift, my soul, to answer Him ! be jubilant, my feet ! 
Our God is marching on. 

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, 
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me ; 
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men 
free, 

While God is marching on. " 

2. Again, this sound of marching in the tops 
of the mulberry-trees, this revelation of God's pres- 
ence to His workers, is manifest to-day in the mis- 
sionary world. Never in all the ages of the past has 
God so plainly spoken to His Church, "Go forth and 
conquer in My name." Walls of separation broken 
down, gates closed for centuries now wide open, the 
hermit nations of the Orient coming out from their 
seclusion and welcoming Christian civilization, the 
Bible translated into all known languages, the Dark 
Continent lighted up with beacon-stations kindled in 
the wilderness by the advance guard of Christ's 
marching army, hundreds of young men and women 



Signals for a Forward Movement. 105 

catching the inspiration of the hour and crying out 
in response to the call for workers, "Here am I, send 
me," — these are only a few of the signs of the times 
which make this the supreme missionary age of the 
world. The call that comes to us from these provi- 
dential signs and tokens is a bugle-shout : O Church 
of Christ, the hour has come for one grand advance 
movement all along the line ! God has opened the 
way, and now He says, Bestir thyself. Enter these 
open doors. Evangelize the people at your gates, 
on your plains, along your coasts, but stop not here. 
Evangelize the world. 

" The whole wide world for Jesus ; 
This shall our watchword be ; 
Up on the highest mountain, 
Down by the widest sea." 

3. The dawning, ripening sense of responsibility 
that marks the turn of youth into manhood indicates 
one of these critical moments. It comes to many 
a boy with a sharp and ominous suddenness. After 
the frivolousness of his teens, the playday and the 
heyday of his school-life, the careless, gleeful hours 
of childhood and frolics of youth, there comes one 
day a suddening awakening. He says, with awe and 
mingled sorrow and joy : "My childhood and youth 
are gone. My days of play and sport are over. My 



106 The Hungry Christ. 

school-life is at an end. I am a man. I can never 
more plead the 'Baby act' to relieve me from re- 
sponsibilities. The law has reckoned me an infant 
till this hour, and under its eye my father has been 
accountable for my conduct. But now I am a man, 
with a vote, and a name, and a character that are 
my own. My life is to be what I may make it. 
With all its sober realities, with all its labors and re- 
sponsibilities, with its grip on eternal issues, life is 
before me!" 

Young man, young woman, standing at the turn- 
ing point which separates you from childhood and 
youth, that quickened sense of accountability within 
your newly disturbed conscience is God's voice. 
Walk softly — it is the touch of God's own hand upon 
you to admonish, to guide, to save. It is the sound 
of marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees, bid- 
ding you bestir yourself. With tremendous earnest- 
ness, with indomitable resolve, with heroic endeavor, 
use your new-found energies in the work to which 
you are assigned. The morning hours are golden — 
use them wisely and well, remembering that the 
night cometh, when no man can work. 

4. The hour of any striking and peculiar provi- 
dence in your life may be reckoned as a special time 
when, according to the text, God calls on you to be- 
stir yourself ! 



Signals for a Forward Movement, 107 

Your life may go on for months at a smooth jog- 
trot. Nothing startling may occur ; all things move 
evenly, monotonously, without a jar. You become, 
in Scriptural language, settled on your lees, or to 
change the figure, at ease in Zion. Smooth sailing, 
quiet seas, no storms, "all quiet along the Potomac" 
of your life ; — when suddenly you are roused by the 
storm. Financial loss or entanglements embarrass 
you ; one of your mental faculties, or some of your 
physical powers, which you fancied were cast-iron, 
threaten to give way; sickness lays you low, and 
gives you a chance to see how empty and hollow 
some of the things are which you thought were 
worth so much ; one that you loved better than life 
is smitten down by your side, and like a bird with 
broken wing you flutter, bleeding, crippled, praying 
for death, on the earth by the edge of a new-made 
grave, — a blow of some kind comes upon you that 
is grievous to bear, under whose weight you stagger 
to and fro ; an arrow from the Almighty transfixes 
you, and the hurt takes hold of your very soul. An 
alliance is formed or planned, in which your inter- 
ests and your very life are interwoven. A friend- 
ship is made that binds you in sympathy to a kin- 
dred spirit, or bonds are broken that almost wrench 
your soul in twain in the agony of separation. A 



xo8 The Hungry Christ. 

child is born into your home, or one is transplanted 
to the heavenly home. These are some of the occa- 
sions when you hear the sound of marching in the 
tops of the mulberry-trees ; some of the times when 
God by His providences commands you to bestir 
yourself. 

Such events are exigent and opportune moments. 
Each one of them is a crisis in your history. Brood 
not over your losses; despond not at your adversi- 
ties; rebel not in view of your bereavements; lose 
not courage in the hour of danger and trial, but 
rather bestir yourself into new activity. God knows 
just what you need, how much you can bear, and 
what path to lead you through. His providence is 
no hit or miss, random, chaotic operation. He can 
make all things work together for your good, if you 
trust Him. In these critical hours of your life re- 
alize that it is God who is guiding, overruling, inter- 
posing, governing, in your soul. By these startling, 
revolutionizing, overturning operations he is sound- 
ing an alarm, making signals of danger which you 
are to heed. 

Take an instance: Job the patriarchal model 
of patience learned this lesson. Behold him in 
plenty and in peace, his flocks and herds on every 
hill, the sound of song and merriment saluting his 



Signals for a Forward Movement. 109 

ear on every breeze from the homes of his children 
settled around him, revered for his wisdom and in- 
tegrity, and beloved for his kindness to the poor. 
Job, in health, riches, peace, and comfort, a chief in 
his tribe— that is the first picture. 

Then the scene changes. Now behold him — 
property all swept out of existence by cyclone, fire, 
flood, and war; children murdered, lands all laid 
waste, his body afflicted with a nameless and dread- 
ful scourge that made life a living death, his wife 
Iturning against him and crying out, "Curse God 
and die ;" his neighbors coming to sympathize with 
him, and under the guise of their comforting visit 
taking occasion to accuse him of having been false- 
hearted all these years ; condoling with and counsel- 
ing him in this fashion: "Job, you old sinner, you 
know you Ve been a hypocrite, or God would not 
punish you so terribly. He is scourging you for 
your secret wickedness. You have been a crafty, 
shrewd old scoundrel. Now, own up, confess your 
hypocrisy, and God will forgive you." That is the 
picture of Job in his trials and sorrows. What did 
he do? Why, he recognized the hand and guid- 
ance and power of God in his afflictions. He heard 
in the storm and the whirlwind and the messages of 
successive disasters that smote his ear the sound of 



no The Hungry Christ. 

marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees. He 
cried out: "I can not understand these griefs and 
lossies. I do not know why I was born to suffer in 
this fashion. The sky is black above me, and I can 
see no ray of light through the clouds that envelop 
me. But one thing I know: Though He slay me, 
yet will I trust Him. The Lord gave, and the Lord 
hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord." 
Job heard the sound of God's footsteps, and he be- 
stirred himself to lay hold on God, and he came off 
more than conqueror! 

5. The time of religious awakening in a commu- 
nity is in the highest sense a call from God for us to 
bestir ourselves. There are seasons for sowing and 
reaping in which labor counts and tells in the world 
of agriculture. Seed sown in the spring, grain gath- 
ered in the harvest — this is the rule from which 
there is no escape. So there are special, opportune 
seasons for religious ingathering. We are indeed to 
work in season and out of season, we are not to get 
weary of well-doing ; but in the hour when in a spe- 
cial way God moves among the people, when un- 
usual interest is taken in the services, when sinners 
become awakened, and careless men and women are 
alarmed, and the Word of God takes hold with 
power upon the hearts of those who hear it — in such 



Signals for a Forward Movement, hi 

signs of divine activity we may hear the sound of 
marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees. God 
is working among men and calling anew to saint 
and sinner, "Bestir thyself !" 

And now, brother-man, let me urge upon you 
'this final truth, that the hour when the Gospel mes- 
sage comes home to you, singling you out from 
others, individualizing you from your fellows, is a 
turning" point in your life. When the Scripture, 
read in solitude, searches you with its commands, 
its warnings, and its examples; when in the sanc- 
tuary the words of the preacher reach your con- 
science, disturb your ease, induce a longing for par- 
don, extort from your broken heart the low, faint, 
hungry cry, "O that I knew where I might find 
Him/' bring you face to face with your sins, with 
all the wastes and follies of your past life, and make 
you to realize your wretchedness and danger — that 
to you is an hour fraught with momentous issues, of 
life or death. "The sound of marching in the tops 
of the mulberry-trees" comes to thy soul, and cries, 
"Bestir thyself! This is the accepted time; this is 
the day of salvation ; this is the proffer of reconcili- 
ation through Christ !" 

I heard a minister, sojourning in the Lake Region 
for a few days, preach in the little chapel on the 



ii2 The; Hungry Christ. 

Island of Mackinac. As he ended his effective ser- 
mon he told this incident: "A little over twenty 
years ago, in the city of Chicago, I went one morn- 
ing into a counting-room to transact an item of 
business. I found the young man whom I sought 
at his desk, finished my work with him in a few min- 
utes, and started to leave. He was not an intimate 
friend, we had not met very often, but each of us 
had been a soldier in the Union army, and that gave 
us a sense of comradeship. As I turned the young 
man called me back and said, "Charley Morton, are 
you a Christian?" I was nettled at being called to 
account with such abruptness, and I answered curtly, 
as though I was going to settle that matter in short 
meter, "No, I am not." He replied with a kindly 
smile, "Are you in such a hurry that you can not 
afford five minutes to talk on this subject?" I was 
reluctant to stop, but I could hardly escape, and so 
I submitted and tarried, without a thought that that 
interview was to decide all my coming life. He 
simply told me his own experience, how he had 
found Christ, and how the Master was to him a sun 
and a shield, a Friend that sticketh closer than a 
brother. As he spoke my conscience was pierced 
and my heart was melted, and I began to feel my 
need of salvation. I went out from that interview 



Signals for a Forward Movement. 113 

without making any promise, or giving any sign of 
inward disturbance, but for days afterward I did 
scarcely anything else in my leisure hours but pray 
and search the Scriptures and seek for salvation. I 
found Christ, and began to teach and to preach His 
Word, and have been spending these years in His 
work simply because my friend in the counting- 
room was faithful in speaking to me the message of 
eternal life. Some months ago I attended his fu- 
neral. His work on earth was done, and as I stood 
by his coffin and looked on his clay-cold face, I said 
to myself: 'Charley Morton, you might have been 
still in the bondage of sin, you might have been in 
hell, but for the kindly and loving words this man 
spoke to you years ago/ The message he uttered 
was the Word of God to my soul." 

That utterance, in that five-minute interview, 
was "the sound of marching in the tops of the mul- 
berry-trees ;" it was God voice entreating the prod- 
igal son to return to his Father's house. Give heed 
to that voice, stop not your ears to that warning cry. 
When it reaches your ear and your heart, welcome 
it, for it means salvation, here and in all the ages 
to come. 
8 



VIII. 

THE HEALING TOUCH. 

"And being moved with compassion Jesus stretched 
forth His hand, and touched him, and saith unto 
him, I will: be thou made clean." — Mark i, 41.* 

I. The; healing^bf the leper, described here, was 
the most significant and representative of all the 
miraculous cures wrought by our Lord during His 
ministry. The incident is full of suggestions : the 
case was a desperate one, as brought out in St. 
Luke's version of the incident; the man recognized 
in his approach and appeal the Master's regal dig- 
nity and divine power, and worshiped Him, uttering 
at the same time his adoring acclaim and petition, 
"Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean." 
The Lord touched the dreadful body of the victim 
with creative and restorative power, and spoke new 
life into a frame almost ready for burial. Taken 



* For the whole story of the healing of the leper, see Matthew 
viii, 2-4 ; Mark i, 40-44 ; and I^uke v, 12-16. 
114 



The Heaung Touch. 115 

altogether, we have a narrative unusually full of 
significance. Where else in all the New Testament 
are the saving grace and almighty power of our 
Lord set forth more clearly than here? Where else 
can we find an instance to illustrate the fact that He 
can save "unto the uttermost" more vividly pictured ? 
2. The very name leprosy is saturated through 
and through with associations which suggest the 
hopelessness and misery of the disease which for 
thousands of years has been recognized as the very 
synonym of repulsiveness and horror. And while 
to-day we have ceased to view the leper as in a pe- 
culiar way the object of God's vengeance or dis- 
pleasure, yet this whole matter of the deplorable 
sufferings of the leper, his outcast condition, and 
indeed the typical character of his malady, have 
come home to us in our time in several ways. The 
Leper Colony on one of the islands of the Hawaiian 
Group, now a part of our national domain ; the hero- 
ism of Father Damien, who gave himself to their 
service and died in order to help them ; the fortitude 
of Mary Reed, who is carrying on her work among 
the lepers of India in her mountain retreat, — all 
these incidents bring the case down to our own door, 
and help us to realize what it meant to be a leper 
in the time of our Lord; they may help us also to 



n6 The Hungry Christ. 

picture to ourselves the unspeakable wretchedness 
of the poor man who in the narrative with which the 
text is related came to our Lord for healing, and 
vivify some of the teachings of the story. 

3. It is worth while to note that the healing of 
the leper is the first miracle recorded by St. Mat- 
thew, who seems to have singled it out as the one 
which ought to stand in the foreground of his Gos- 
pel. This evangelist segregates this particular ex- 
hibition of divine power and mercy from all the 
other cures wrought by our Lord while on the earth 
as the one which ought to rank first in the wonderful 
procession of healings. As Matthew's Gospel was 
intended primarily for the Jews, and was designed 
to set forth our Lord as the Messiah of prophecy, 
we may reasonably conclude that the evangelist had 
a purpose in this selection. First and foremost 
among the healings he wanted the Jew to see this 
matchless miracle, — the healing of a leper, the cure 
of a disease which had been reckoned from earliest 
date absolutely incurable, a disease which was 
deemed a special infliction of Divine wrath, and an 
unparalleled type of the repulsiveness and awfulness 
and hopelessness of sin. 

According also to Matthew's version the healing 



The; Heaung. Touch. 117 

took place soon after the Sermon on the Mount. 
Perhaps the leper may have stood in the outskirts of 
the multitude, or may have been hidden in some 
adjacent cave, or may have stood on some knoll at a 
distance from the Master, and thus may have heard 
some of the utterances of that discourse. Perhaps 
it was that sermon, along with the reports of other 
healings of different sorts, which prompted and en- 
couraged the poor wretch to venture into the pres- 
ence of our Lord with his suffering and need. The 
scene, when we come to study it, is a memorable 
one. The Master has been teaching the people, and 
has ended His work when suddenly there is a panic 
in the crowd — just such a sight as would be occa- 
sioned on a busy street in our own time should a 
man all broken out with smallpox, or afflicted with 
the same dreadful disease as is mentioned in the 
Gospel story, suddenly appear among the people. 
Everybody would fly; there would be exclamations 
of horror, and a panicky flight from the spot. So, 
on this occasion, a leper brings his "tainted and un- 
welcome presence into the shrinking crowd." A 
man in a frightful condition, leprous from head to 
foot, as bad a case as can be fancied, his unkempt 
hair, his hoarse and gurgling voice, his bandaged 



n8 The; Hungry Christ. 

face, his rent garments, all testifying that he was an 
outcast from society, approached the Master, fell 
on his knees, then on his face to the earth, with the 
cry, "Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou canst make me 
clean I" 

And the Master recognized the appeal, touched 
the putrid flesh, healed the man, and sent him away 
rejoicing. This is the picture which we are to study. 

4. The social and religious isolation of the leper, 
as prescribed in the Jewish law, still has its lessons 
for the world. Students of the Bible for many cen- 
turies have found in the desolate and abandoned 
status of the victim of leprosy a vivid and unmis- 
takable symbol of the condition into which sin in- 
evitably brings the human soul. Surely the scholars 
of all the centuries have not been in error when they 
have found in the Levitical prescriptions on this sub- 
ject a most impressive series of symbolic lessons 
concerning the hideousness of sin in the sight of 
God. Look at the case of the leper for a moment 
from this standpoint. 

Leprosy, for example, is singled out from all 
other maladies by the Levitical law, and treated 
after a fashion which is utterly inexplicable unless 
the purpose was to set forth this disease as an "out- 



The Heaung Touch. 119 

ward and visible sign" of the inward corruption 
which sin works in the human soul. It was a par- 
able of death; the leper was a living picture of 
doom ; he was literally, as an old writer aptly termed 
him, supulchram ambulans, a walking sepulcher, an 
image of moral defilement and ruin whose utmost 
meaning no mortal can grasp. 

There were many other diseases prevalent in that 
far-away age which were frightful and deadly; but 
this one was singled out from all the others as a 
malady which rendered a man ceremonially unclean. 
The very word itself means "a smiting;" even the 
shade of a tree under which the leper might tarry 
to repose his exhausted body was defiled ; the victim 
of the disease, not only by public sentiment and hu- 
man fear, but also by the statutes of the Jewish law, 
was ejected from all fellowship with his kind, and 
thrust out like a wild beast to wander alone in his 
misery and die far off from the habitations of men. 
There is no parallel to be found in the Bible to com- 
pare for a moment with the status of the ancient 
Hebrew leper. 

Two chapters in Leviticus are occupied with 
directions concerning the method of detecting the 
symptoms of leprosy, and with definitions of the 



120 The Hungry Christ. 

penalty to be inflicted upon those who suffered from 
the disease. Listen to a brief citation from Leviticus 
(xiii, 45, 46) : 

"And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall 
be rent, and the hair of his head shall go loose, and he shall 
cover his upper lip, and shall cry, Unclean, Unclean! All 
the days wherein the plague is in him he shall be unclean ; 
he is unclean ; he shall dwell alone ; without the camp shall 
his dwelling be. " 

Judged by our modern standards of philanthropy 
this seems inhuman ; we do not allow even dumb ani- 
mals to be thus treated to-day. Nevertheless we are 
blind if we look at the statutes in the case from that 
one standpoint alone. There is a lesson here which 
had to be enforced in a primitive age, and among a 
people just emerging from savagery, through what 
Bunyan calls Eye-Gate and Ear-Gate. There seems 
to have been no other way but this graphic and 
typical method whereby there could be set forth, so 
that even a child might understand it, the lesson 
that sin separates between God and man ; that sin is 
hateful and horrible in his sight; that sin alienates 
the soul from heaven, and makes of man an outcast, 
an alien from the commonwealth of Israel, and a 
stranger from the covenants of promise. In the 
story of the Prodigal Son it is significantly said that 
the boy "took his departure into a far country." 



The Heaung Touch. 121 

That is a picture of the alienation always involved 
in the sinner's course. That far country was not 
only far from the father's house, but far from hope, 
and peace, and heaven. 

Even from the sanctuary lepers were excluded; 
there was no altar to which he might bring his offer- 
ing ; there was no priest who might venture to min- 
ister to him in his degradation ; in all possible ways 
the idea was stamped upon the victim himself, and 
upon society as well, that he was a hated and doomed 
thing, blighted with a curse from which there was 
no escape. 

All this was simply a revelation to that age, and 
it remains in our time also a warning and a decla- 
ration, of the detestation and horror which sin 
awakens in God. This spectacle of the leper, an 
offense to the eye, blasted from head to foot, stoned 
and jeered at by his fellows, and thrust out to perish 
in the wilderness, is an object lesson whose mean- 
ing is still alive. It gives us a hint of the impression 
which sin makes upon the mind of the Almighty. It 
is as though He had said : "Sin is a scourge, a mon- 
strous defilement, it is like leprosy. I can not abide 
it. The man who chooses sin, who remains in his in- 
iquity, and cleaves to his rebellion, is estranged from 
Me, is shut out from My fellowship, is an alien and 



122 The: Hungry Christ. 

an outcast." No wonder that Job cried out in his 
distress when a sudden revelation of the divine holi- 
ness smote him to the quick, "I have heard of Thee 
by the hearing of the ear; but now mine eye seeth 
Thee: wherefore I abhor myself and repent in dust 
and ashes." And no wonder that Isaiah, appalled 
and transfixed with a sight of the King on His 
throne, fell on his face in confusion and cried, "Woe 
is me : for I am undone." 

5. The extraordinary faith of the leper, in view 
of his desperate plight, needs to be emphasized. It 
has few parallels in the whole range of the Gospel 
history. This man as a typical believer deserves to 
stand alongside of the centurion of whom the Mas- 
ter said, "I have not found so great faith, no, not in 
Israel." He may take rank with the Penitent Trans- 
gressor who on the cross had insight to discern the 
kingly qualities and divine authority of the Man of 
Nazareth. Is there, indeed, anywhere in Scripture 
a better illustration of the simplicity, the beauty, 
and the power of saving faith in Jesus Christ as One 
endowed with omnipotent authority, than we find 
here exemplified in the conduct, the confession, and 
the plea of the leper ? 

His faith becomes all the more remarkable when 
we note that he was not brought by friends to the 
Savior. No one cared for him; no one told him to 



The; Hsaung Touch. 123 

go ; he was abandoned of all men, and in his hope- 
less estate there was none to help him. The para- 
lytic was brought to the Savior by four of his 
friends; mothers carried their children to the great 
Physician; messengers flew across the plains and 
over the hills to ask relief for stricken homes and 
dying men and women. But for this leper there 
was no intercessor. He bore his case alone into 
the presence of the Redeemer. His faith was 
of the stalwart sort that can stand alone, without 
support on either side. 

Then, too, consider what was involved in the 
appeal which he made: "Lord, if Thou wilt, Thou 
canst make me clean I" Here was a recognition of 
the almighty power of Jesus of Nazareth such as 
no one else had yet shown. No mortal thus far in 
the course of our Lord's ministry had dared to 
dream that He could cure the leprosy. No pre- 
cedent for such a healing had been set by Him. 
No prophecy was contained in the Old Testament 
covering such a case. No promise had been 
spoken by Him indicating that He was com- 
missioned to achieve such a work. Later in His 
career He said to His disciples, "Heal the sick, 
cleanse the lepers, cast out demons," but hitherto no 
such work had been done by Him or by the apostles. 
Yet this poor fellow in his solitary broodings, in his 



124 The Hungry Christ. 

prayers alone in his filthy den, in his wanderings 
over the dusty hills, had finally reached the conclu- 
sion that this great Physician could do for him what 
no one else on earth could do — cleanse him from his 
malignant disease, and so he came to our Lord with 
his cry, "If Thou wilt, Thou canst make me clean !" 

His faith embraced the simple fact which the 
Roman centurion glorified when he intimated that 
Jesus Christ was the Commander-in-chief of all the 
forces in the universe, that He had but to "speak 
the word," and the sick man should be healed. Is 
there, after all, a simpler, or a more helpful, or a 
more blessed creed than this brief one, set forth in 
the spirit, the words, and the attitude of these two 
typical believers in the Gospel — this creed that in 
language which may be understood by a child, and 
which yet compasses the needs of the strongest and 
the wisest of mankind, cries out: "I believe in the 
almighty power of Jesus Christ ?" That is the creed 
which has in it the secret and the motive force for 
the conquest of the world ! 

6. And now look, -finally, at the healing touch 
whereby the man was cured* This is perhaps the 
most significant and memorable element in the pic- 

*The paragraphs which close this sermon have been used in 
print recently in another form by the writer, although not under his 
own name. 



The Healing Touch. 125 

ture which we have been studying, for the Master 
did not need to touch the leper in order to perform 
the cure. In many other cases of healing His work 
was done by a word alone. In two or three instances 
— the cases of a blind man, and of one who was deaf 
and dumb — the Master used His hands, and per- 
sonal contact with the sufferer, apparently as much 
for the purpose of developing a co-operative faith 
as with the intent of showing His compassionate 
feeling for the ones to be healed. Here, however, 
He did not need to touch the leper in order to en- 
courage him to believe; the man was already a be- 
liever in an extraordinary sense; at the same time 
he had learned the lesson of submission and resig- 
nation, for instead of clamoring for relief, he simply 
put his case into the hands of the Great Physician ; 
his prayer was only an implied petition. For the 
leper's sake the touch may not have been necessary ; 
and yet how much it meant to him ! A human hand 
was laid upon his fevered and corroding flesh, after 
the lapse of years, and after unspeakable isolation 
and suffering ! In all that time no human being had 
come into contact with him ; no little child had ven- 
tured to caress him ; no wife or sister or mother had 
dressed his ulcerous flesh ; no man had laid a finger 
in greeting or kindness upon him since that awful 
day, years ago, when the priest after examination 



126 The Hungry Christ. 

had pronounced him a leper, and had spoken his sen- 
tence: "Thou shalt dwell alone; thou art accursed; 
thou art to all thy fellows and in the sight of God 
unclean; go forth from the dwellings of men and 
bear thy burden and thy carcass out of their sight !" 
Alone he had gone forth to wrestle with his anguish 
of mind and body; alone he had borne his load of 
pain and solitude, — and now to feel the soothing, 
gentle hand of Jesus touch him ; it was like a breath 
of heaven to one who had been living in hell. The 
healing touch was an extraordinary token of the 
sympathy of Christ, an overplus from the boundless 
stores of His compassion ! 

It was, furthermore, the beginning of the break- 
down of heartless ritualistic ceremonialism, the in- 
auguration of the task of smiting to the earth the 
barriers which caste, legal enactment, superstition, 
and prejudice had built up about the leper and such 
as he, — a rebuke needed in every age by those who 
fail to recognize in the form of the outcast and the 
lowly signs of kinship and brotherhood. In the face 
of the legal prescriptions in the case ; in defiance of 
the dense and superstitious prejudices of His dis- 
ciples and of the multitude, notwithstanding ages of 
custom, harder than adamant, the Master touched 
the leper, and thus assured him of his royal lineage 
and relationship. Blessed spectacle! and as full of 



The Heaung Touch. 127 

meaning for our own time and generation as for the 
times of our Lord ! 

By that single touch the Master said to the won- 
dering and listening centuries: "Behold Me, the 
Lord and Giver of life, the Prince of glory, the Son 
of God, touch this man in token of recognition, fel- 
lowship, compassion, brotherhood ! Rags, filth, fes- 
tering flesh, physical blight, poverty, the color-line, 
caste distinctions, — these are no signs of separation 
from Me, no bars against admission into My king- 
dom. Down through all disguises and disfigure- 
ments I look, and find underneath them all a human 
soul, which I waken into new hope and health and 
life by My healing touch. I have come to seek and 
to save that which was lost. This leper is an own 
brother to the King. I put My hands upon him in 
token of our common relationship." 

O what a rebuke was by this act for all time ad- 
ministered to supercilious pride, to cruel caste, to 
human prejudice and hate, and to all methods of 
long-range philanthropy ! 

And then consider for a moment what a fruitful 
touch that was. Out of it have come the healing 
and recuperative ministries of modern medicine, the 
work of the nurse, the physician, the hospital, and 
the asylum, and all the myriad philanthropies which 
make our age a marvel among the centuries. And 



128 The Hungry Christ. 

to-day there can be found no disease too dreadful, 
no patient too squalid or loathsome or deformed, no 
wounds too ghastly, to be helped and served by the 
surgeon, the physician, and the nurse. Healing 
hands, soothing touches, gentle and considerate min- 
istrations for the lowest and the vilest — all because 
one day in the long ago Jesus of Nazareth touched 
a perishing leper and healed him ! 

" Thine arm, O Lord, in days of old 

Was strong to heal and save ; 
It triumphed o'er disease and death, 

O'er darkness and the grave ; 
To Thee they went, the blind, the dumb, 

The palsied and the lame ; 
The leper with his tainted life, 

The sick with fevered frame. 

And lo ! Thy touch brought life and health, 

Gave speech and strength and sight; 
And youth renewed and frenzy calmed 

Owned Thee, the Lord of light ! 
And now, O Lord, be near to bless, 

Almighty as of yore, 
In crowded street, by restless couch, 

As by Genesareth's shore. 

Be Thou our great Deliverer still, 

Thou Lord of life and death ; 
Restore and quicken, soothe and bless 

With Thine almighty breath. 
To hands that work and eyes that see 

Give wisdom's heavenly lore ; 
That whole and sick, and weak and strong, 

May praise Thee evermore. " 



IX. 

A MAN AS AN HIDING PLACE. 

"And a Man shall be as an hiding place from the 
wind, and a covert from the tempest: as rivers of 
water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great 
rock in a weary land" — Isa. xxxii, 2. 

1. There is only one Man in the whole human 
race of whom all these things could be said, — and that 
is the Man Christ Jesus. Among all who have ever 
lived on the globe, teachers, sages, rulers, reformers, 
legislators, helpers of every grade, only one can be 
indicated of whom it can be said that he is a covert 
from the wind, and the shadow of a great rock in a 
weary land, — and that is the Man whose birth at 
Bethlehem cut the ages in two, divided human his- 
tory in twain, marked the epoch from which in all 
after time the nations should reckon their dates, in- 
troduced the elements of philanthropy into the world, 
planted a new hope in the weary heart of our race, 
put a new song upon human lips, and established the 
9 129 



130 - The; Hungry Christ. 

kingdom of heaven among men. The fact of His 
birth, now before us in the Christmas season once 
more, suggests His humanity as an edifying theme 
of meditation; He was a man, born of a woman, 
made under the law, subject to temptation and toil, 
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and by 
virtue of His human experiences, having become one 
of us, and yet being divine in His lineage and spirit 
and authority and power, He has become the only 
refuge and covert to which we may fly in danger 
and need. His humanity, real, tender, full of sym- 
pathy, and yet full of power, makes Him as an hiding 
place from the wind, makes His ministry like that 
of rivers of water in a dry place, bringing refresh- 
ment and fertility and beauty in its wake, and ren- 
ders Him in His relations to the grief-stricken, the 
oppressed, and the heavy-laden like the shadow of a 
great rock in a weary land. Under these Oriental 
figures of speech let us find the blessings which they 
symbolize, the treasures of safety, comfort, rest, shel- 
ter, and refreshment which are lodged for the human 
race in His divine humanity. 

2. The Oriental metaphors found in the text are 
not easily apprehended at their full value except by 
those who have traveled in the tropical deserts of 
the Old World, or who have crossed the dusty plains 
of the New, the vast and dreary and yet wonderfully 



A Man as an Hiding Place;. 131 

impressive prairies of our own continent. The im- 
agery of the text is not peculiar to Isaiah, but is 
found in some of its expressions and aspects in other 
writers of the Old Testament. They lived in lands 
which languished under the equatorial sun; they 
were familiar with drought, and dust, and dreadful 
heat. They had all passed through seasons when 
there was no rain, when the heavens were brass, and 
the earth was parched and sere and barren; — they 
knew what it was to travel over vast tracts of sand, 
where every breath of air was like a hot blast from 
an oven. And they knew also what it was to have 
this long, dreadful spell of heat to be suddenly 
broken up by tempestuous storms which swept the 
surface of the earth with a besom of destruction. 
Under these circumstances their symbols as found 
in the text, and elsewhere, became charged with a 
significance and vividness and force which are ex- 
traordinary. Men with a poetical temperament and 
a prophetic spirit, and endowed with the rich, fertile, 
and glowing imagination of the Orient, understood 
by the very stress of their circumstances, by their 
own oft-repeated experience, what these symbols 
meant, — "a hiding place from the wind, a covert 
from the tempest, rivers of water in a dry place, the 
shadow of a great rock in a weary land." And when 
they described One Man by these metaphors and 



132 The Hungry Christ. 

similes, when they symbolized His ministry of grace 
and renewal and rescue and invigoration by this 
imagery, they were attributing to Him the possession 
of the best qualities, the highest and noblest func- 
tions, that they were acquainted with. A Man who 
should be all of this to other men, — it must be clear 
that He must transcend His fellows. 

3. This conclusion is made evident from the fact 
that the psalmists and the prophets use these same 
terms to describe the Divine Being. David says, 
The Lord is my refuge and my fortress and my high 
tower. Isaiah (xxv, 4) says: O Lord God, Thou 
hast been a stronghold to the needy in his distress, 
a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat. 
Moses said to Israel (Deut. xxxiii, 27) : The eternal 
God is thy refuge. Martin Luther, you may recall, 
built upon the forty-sixth psalm one of his great 
hymns, Bin' feste Burg ist unser Gott, one of the 
translations of which begins : 

"A fortress firm and steadfast rock 
Is God in time of danger ; 
A shield and sword in every shock. 
From foe well known, or stranger." 

That psalm begins with the utterance, God is our 
refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. 
When Luther was perplexed and driven, when his 
foes threatened him and his perils multiplied, he was 



A Man as an Hiding Pi^ace. 133 

accustomed to call his friends together and say, "Let 
us turn to our stronghold: Sing the forty-sixth 
Psalm." So in the forty-eighth Psalm we read that 
God hath made Himself known in the palaces of 
Judah as a refuge. And in another place we read 
that God's children shall have a place of refuge. 
And still again in the farewell address of the Law- 
giver of Israel we are told, In the Lord Jehovah 
there is an everlasting refuge, or, as the margin 
renders it, the Rock of Ages. (Deut. xxxii, 4.) 

These are a few passages out of scores that might 
be cited showing that the same metaphors which are 
used in the text as descriptive of the Man referred 
to, are applied in other places to the Supreme God. 
It must therefore be a supreme, unique, exceptional, 
and transcendent sort of man who is had in view by 
the prophet in the words of the text. No mere man, 
however extraordinary his gifts and abilities, can 
come completely under the description of the pas- 
sage so as to fill out its meaning perfectly. The sym- 
bolism fits only one Man, that One whose divine 
humanity is the new type and model for all men, 
whose compassions and philanthropies and graces 
have been the renewing force of all our civilization, 
and whose invitations of mercy, provisions for hu- 
man need, comforting words, and guiding hand con- 



134 The Hungry Christ. 

stitute Him indeed the Shadow of a Great Rock in 
a weary land for all our race. His grace and mercy 
and power more than justify the words of the poet : 

" The Shadow of the Rock! 
Abide! Abide! 
This Rock moves ever at thy side, 
Pausing to welcome thee at eventide. 
Ages are laid 
Beneath its shade — 
Rest in the Shadow of the Rock! 

The Shadow of the Rock ! 
Always at hand, 
Unseen it cools the noontide land, 
And quells the fire that nickers in the sand. 
It comes in sight 
Only at night — 
Rest in the Shadow of the Rock!" 

4. It may help us to apprehend the truth found 
in the text if we recall a principle which is susceptible 
of very wide illustration ; namely, that in every crisis 
in human affairs the hearts of a community, a State, 
or a nation turn toward some man of the hour, whose 
resources of leadership, helpfulness, wisdom, insight, 
or compassion qualify him for the exigent task to be 
accomplished. 

In 1889, for instance, the city of Johnstown, 
Pennsylvania, was devastated by the breaking of a 
dam, and a destructive flood, which destroyed over 
two thousand lives, made the center of the beautiful 
city a waste of sand and gravel, undermined and car- 



A Man as an Hiding Pi,ace;. 135 

ried away stores, houses, churches, railroad trains, 
bridges, in all the worst calamity of the sort ever 
known in the land. At first confusion, horror, chaos, 
and panic ruled in the whole community. Then a 
man came to the front, — General Daniel H. Hast- 
ings, adjutant-general of the State of Pennsylvania, 
who was sent by Governor Beaver to take command. 
The militia were in his charge; the supplies which 
began to pour in hy the hundreds of thousands of 
dollars were distributed by him; the work of clean- 
ing up the debris, of burying the dead, of identifying 
the victims, of answering inquiries from all parts of 
the world concerning the missing, — all the task of 
bringing order out of chaos fell on him, — a work 
that taxed his wisdom, his sympathies, his executive 
talents, his patience, his physical strength, his varied 
abilities, to the utmost. But he proved to be the man 
for the crisis ; not soon will Pennsylvania forget his 
toil, and now that he is dead that great State, having 
since then honored him as governor, will continue 
to recall and commemorate him not only because he 
was a valiant soldier in the Civil War, and a lawyer 
of conspicuous rank, and a Chief Executive of noble 
gifts, but because when a crisis came he was the man 
for the hour. In a terrible emergency he was to that 
great Commonwealth as a hiding place from the 
wind and a covert from the tempest. 



136 The; Hungry Christ. 

A scene of like import and similar suggestive- 
ness was transacted in the town of Butler, Pennsyl- 
vania, where typhoid fever was recently epidemic. 
A man came to the front, — a wise, skilled, and ex- 
pert physician, a specialist in dealing with this dis- 
ease. Citizens, nurses, local medical men, ministers, 
philanthropists, all yielded to him, and acknowledged 
his authority and leadership. When, in answer to a 
telegram telling of the ravages of the disease, the 
number of the dead, the hundreds that were sick, the 
spread of the epidemic, and the panic that had seized 
everybody, — he came from an Eastern city, and said, 
inside of an hour, "We need a hundred thousand 
dollars at once ; give me that best residence in town 
and that factory, and that office building as hospitals ; 
we must have a hundred more nurses to-day," his 
word became law, and he became as a refuge and 
hiding place for that community and for the region 
threatened by the fever. 

Or, taking a larger field for our scope of obser- 
vation, let us glance at the world of finance for an 
illustration. Some time ago there was a panic in 
Wall Street; the industrial stocks, overcapitalized, 
took a sudden and alarming shoot downwards ; rail- 
road securities, as good as gold in their intrinsic 
values, sympathized with the decline and drooped in 



"A Man as an Hiding Pi, ace. 137 

their market ratings until they almost broke the rec- 
ord. No one knew what the outcome might be. A 
run on the banks, reckless destructions of all valu- 
ations in the market, a panic everywhere prevalent, — 
this seemed to be the prospect. Then it was that a 
man came to be the hiding place and refuge of the 
financial realm. Then it was that a master of the 
situation appeared on the stage. He came to the 
defense of the industrial and railroad stocks, bought 
heavily right and left, let it be known that he be- 
lieved the interests of investors were not in immedi- 
ate danger, and thus saved the day. In a similar 
sense General Grant and Grover Cleveland, in crit- 
ical hours of panic and financial uncertainty, stood 
like walls of granite against the tides of panic, dis- 
aster, fiat currency, free silver, and financial reck- 
lessness which swept through the country. They 
showed by their courage, their insight, their adher- 
ence to their convictions, that they appreciated and 
commanded the situation, and the heart of the Nation 
turned toward them in confidence and hope. They 
were as a refuge and hiding place in that critical 
hour for the world of investors and financiers 
through all the land. 

So there have been other times when a man, by 
means of his judicial poise, his absolute devotion to 



138 The Hungry Christ. 

the interests of the people, his discernment of the 
meaning of the questions which needed to be de- 
cided, became a hiding place for the whole Nation. 
Thus it was with Washington in the Revolution. 
But for his steadiness of judgment, his freedom from 
personal ambition, his unselfish service, his fortitude 
and bravery, his staying qualities, the Colonies would 
have given up the struggle long before the end came. 
He was literally the hiding place of the United Col- 
onies for seven long years of war and waiting. And 
in other crises Andrew Jackson and William Mc- 
Kinley were men toward whom the hearts of the 
people turned in anxiety and uncertainty, willing 
to wait, and anxious to trust, and ready to co-operate 
and more than anxious to save the Union. And 
then what an illustration we have in the case of that 
man who stood in the breach in the most dreadful 
hour of danger which the Union has known ! The 
people and the army in the perilous days of '61 be- 
lieved in the flag, in the Constitution, in the perpe- 
tuity of the national unity, and in the righteousness 
of their cause, but they believed also above all things 
in the manhood of the leader who stood at the front, 
who bore their burdens and endured their sorrows, 
and strove to comfort them in their need. And when 



A Man as an Hiding Place. 139 

he looked here and there for a leader for his armies, 
what a voice was that which aroused and strength- 
ened him when Edmund Clarence Stedman wrote 
his poem, "Wanted — A Man!" Hear one of his 

stanzas : 

"Is there never one in all the land 

One on whose might the Cause might lean ; 
Are all the common ones so grand, 
And all the titled ones so mean? 
- What if your failure may have been 

In trying to make good bread from bran? 
From worthless metal a weapon keen? — 
Abraham Lincoln, give us a Man !" 

These historic illustrations may suffice to suggest 
the elemental truth that in critical times of trial and 
peril the heart of the Nation turns to a man for 
refuge, and finds in his wisdom, his courage, his 
nobility and leadership a sure foundation for its con- 
fidence and hope. And if in the not distant future 
the United States shall face another crisis, if difficult 
questions are to be settled and hard problems are to 
be solved; if the national credit is to be sustained, 
and the Government's courage is to be justified, — 
we need not fear with such a man as Theodore 
Roosevelt at the helm. Once more in time of exigent 
trial and turbulent agitation and tumultuous uncer- 
tainty the heart of the people would lean on a man, 
and find him equal to the arduous tests of the hour. 



140 The Hungry "Christ. 

Once again it would be true that a man would prove 
as a hiding place and a covert from the tempest ! 

4. But perhaps I have tarried too long with these 
types and illustrations of the truth set forth in the 
text, — the truth that for the human race in its toils 
and temptations, its griefs and pains, its perplexities 
and burdens, a Man has been found who is to be for 
a hiding place and a covert from storm and tempest. 
The strongest and the best need to find support and 
stay and guidance and shelter in sources of super- 
human strength and help. Self-reliance is an ele- 
ment of vital importance in every great character, 
but that element alone in urgent and extreme times 
of trial does not suffice. A life that is of first grade 
value needs to be anchored and stayed to something 
above and beyond itself. There are hours when its 
own strength is insufficient, its own resources are of 
no avail ; it must find help outside of itself or it can 
not live. In such times of critical danger and need 
it turns to the stronghold, to the refuge provided in 
the Gospel, to the Man who has been set forth as a 
hiding place, and is safe. 

Along the Union line of battle, where troops 
were held in reserve, on the third day at Gettysburg, 
when the Confederates opened upon the Army of the 
Potomac their final cannonade, the most dreadful 



A Man as an Hiding Pi,ace. 141 

storm of shot and shell that up to that hour had ever 
been known on the continent, it seemed for a few 
moments as if nothing could stand before the fiery 
tempest. The worst havoc threatened those who 
were just over the hill, the missiles by the hundred 
falling and exploding in the midst of them ; even the 
staff officers of the general commanding the army 
were driven in panic from their headquarters. At 
one point in the line was a barricade of granite 
rocks, many rods in extent. A regimental com- 
mander, seeing that nothing was gained by exposure 
to such a tempest of iron hail, quickly commanded 
his men to shelter themselves behind the rocks. How 
grateful was that refuge! How safe were those 
who, hiding there, saw the missiles of death fly past 
them, or harmlessly strike against the rocky wall 
which afforded them security till the hour came when 
they were needed on the front line to beat back the 
charging columns of Pickett. When a man has gone 
through an experience like that he realizes what the 
shadow of a great rock means to one in deadly peril. 
And looking away from the great struggle at Gettys- 
burg to the daily conflicts and struggles which beset 
his own life, he may the better understand what the 
Psalmist had in mind when he exclaimed : "From the 
ends of the earth will I cry unto Thee, when my 



142 The; Hungry Christ. 

heart is overwhelmed, Lead me to the Rock that 
is higher than I !" 

Blessed truth, the Man Christ Jesus is our never- 
failing refuge ! Are you perplexed with intellectual 
difficulties, burdened with doubts, tormented with 
the doctrinal contentions and uncertainties of the 
hour? Are you weary and careworn, heartbroken 
with loss, disaster, or bereavement ? Have you been 
driven with the storms of life until you seem to be 
in a dreary desert, a land of drought and barrenness 
and devastation? Are you smitten with a sense of 
your sinfulness, your weakness, your need of pardon 
and renewal? I bring to you good tidings of a 
refuge which is available for you. Turning to the 
Man who ages ago was set forth in the prophet's 
picturesque vision as a hiding place, you may find 
in Him, — in His human sympathies, His tender com- 
passion, His considerate gentleness, His infinite 
mercy, — a covert from the tempest. He will be to 
you in the hour of need and trial as rivers of water 
in a dry place, as the Shadow of a Great Rock in a 
weary land ! 

And if you have gone thus far through life with- 
out striving to find a place of safety, I beseech you 
to think on your needs, your dangers, your sins, and 
turn to the stronghold, to the refuge set before you 
in the Gospel. 



A Man as an Hiding Place. 143 

" Haste, traveler, haste ! trie night comes on, 
And many a shining hour is gone ; 
The storm is gathering in the west, 
And thou art far from home and rest. 
Haste, traveler, haste ! 

O, far from home thy footsteps stray ; 
Christ is the Life and Christ the Way, 
And Christ the Light ; thy setting sun 
Sinks ere thy morning is begun ; — 
Haste, traveler, haste ! 

Awake, awake ! pursue thy way 
With steady course, while yet 't is day ; 
While thou art sleeping on the ground, 
Danger and darkness gather round, — 
Haste, traveler, haste ! 

The rising tempest sweeps the sky ; 
The rains descend, the winds are high ; 
The waters swell, and death and fear 
Beset thy path, nor refuge near, — 
Haste, traveler, haste ! 

O yes, a refuge you may gain, 
A covert from the wind and rain, 
A hiding place, a rest, a home, 
A refuge from the wrath to come, — 
Haste, traveler, haste ! 

Then linger not in all the plain, 
Flee for thy life, the mountain gain ; 
Look not behind, make no delay, 
O speed thee, speed thee on thy way, — 
Haste, traveler, haste ! 

Poor, lost, benighted soul ! art thou 
Willing to find salvation now ? 
There yet is hope ; hear mercy's call : 
Truth, Life, Light, Way! in Christ is all! 
Haste to Him, haste ! " 



MAY 31 1904 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: May 2006 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATIOI 
1 1 1 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 15066 
(724)779-2111 




i 



#' ■ 






